Maika Monroe

In Cold Light

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Ava head on

Maika Monroe’s lean athleticism – she used to be a professional kiteboarder – suits her to In Cold Light, a grungey thriller in which she plays a drug dealer who goes on the run when things take a “shit got real” turn. It’s a subjective chase movie, very tightly focused on Monroe’s Ava, who we meet in a pre-credits sequence in the middle of a police raid during which she crashes through a window and tries to make a break for it. Post-credits it’s a few years later and Ava is fresh out of prison and trying to take back her drug business from her brother, who now has his feet under the table. … Read more

100 Nights of Hero

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Maika Monroe as Cherry

100 Nights of Hero re-invents the One Thousand and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights, aka the story of Scheherazade, making sex and gender dynamics more explicit even than they were in the original stories and packaging everything up like a gift of Turkish delight wrapped in gossamer, drenched in perfume, and then swaddled in silk. Don’t come for realism, in other words. Instead director Julia Jackman defiantly heads into the realm of the fantastical, the exotic, the exquisite. Her Middle East is one of grand viziers and curly slippers rather than mad mullahs and nuclear enrichment facilities. So, we all know the Scheherazade story. A wily virgin bride, the latest in a … Read more

Longlegs

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A reflective Agent Lee Harker

A young FBI agent investigates a serial killer who cackles, dresses creepily and likes to leave cryptic clues at the scene of the crime. Longlegs is another belt of 1990s horror for those who can’t get enough Seven, It or The Silence of the Lambs. It’s derivative and yet it’s also its own beast, involving, excellently crafted and stonkingly acted. And Nicolas Cage is in it – as mad as a bat and every second he’s on the screen wildly entertaining, and freaky. Director Osgood Perkins’s decision to shoot it all like an Edward Hopper painting – still, flat, empty, so many brown hues – is the masterstroke, and Maika Monroe plays along … Read more

God Is a Bullet

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Maika Monroe as Case

Wow, God Is a Bullet is violent. Teeth-kicked-out violent. And it’s Maika Monroe, slender, fragile Maika Monroe having her teeth kicked out. She also has her nose broken twice (at least) during the course of this long and almost relentlessly brutal film. Not her, of course, but her character, Case. She’s known as “Headcase” to the cackling, tattooed, wild-eyed members of the cult she used to belong to but has now left, no doubt partly on account of having had her teeth kicked out, nose broken etc etc Rewind. Bob (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a smalltown cop, a “seat warmer” and “desk cowboy” as his partner disparagingly calls him, is galvanised into action when his … Read more

Watcher

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Maika Monroe as Julie

Watcher stars Maika Monroe as a woman who’s arrived in Bucharest with her husband (Karl Glusman) and who is soon convinced that the guy living in the depressing Communist-era block opposite is watching her from his window, behind a filthy net curtain. There’s also a killer on the loose, one who preys on young women and who likes to cut off their heads. It’s making Julia (Monroe) anxious, and her anxiety is amplified by the fact that she can’t speak the lingo – though she’s trying – and her husband isn’t being quite the rock she’d hoped. He’s out at work all day, leaving her to stew. And when she starts voices her concerns … Read more