Love Is the Monster (2025) - Horror Film Review

Having seen the terrible Karen the Beauty Queen Butcher earlier in the day, I was hoping for a horror of a better quality to really cleanse the palette, I wanted a film that took itself a bit more seriously. Love Is the Monster was a folk-horror whose story was based in Finland. Directed and co-written by Alex Noyer (Sound of Violence, Conductor), this tries to tell a serious story, but emphasis on the tries.

Justin (Leonardo Nam - Werewolf by Night) and Ana (Madeline Zima - The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) have gone to a couples retreat in the wilderness of Finland on the insistence of Ana's best friend, Harper (Kimberley-Sue Murray - Crimson Peak), who is also going with her partner. The retreat is run by Tiina (Milla Puolakanaho), the hippy-like leader of a cult who worship a local nature God known as Lampa. At her retreat she helps those who are struggling in their relationships, using her perspective on life. Justin is fully on board for this, but Ana really doesn't want to be there. Tiina's religion is a sexual one, and lust soon permeates the air. With the guests all giving into their carnal desires, they also begin to hallucinate evil looking doppelgangers with glowing golden eyes. It seems that Tiina has something sinister in mind for Ana in particular, something that involves the rebirth of Lampa into a physical form.

The first half of this 90 minute horror was very slow. It was made up of various couples having sex or otherwise just getting naked at the drop of a hat (the film includes full frontal male nudity, plus lots of breasts and butts if that is your thing). The only visible signs of horror came from the golden eyed hallucinations and a bucket-load of CG birds. There was the idea here that anyone who dies literally transforms into a bird. With birds being my favourite animal, it was hardly the stuff of nightmares imagining that happening. It also didn't help that the many flocks of birds were entirely CG, it never felt like there was a single real bird in the entire film. Other bad looking CG came in the form of digital looking fires, with one mini-explosion in particular looking like something from a made for TV movie. There were some cool looking kill scenes with practical special effects used, such as someone stabbed to death with a stag antler. There was plenty of blood, alongside possessed people, and of course the fake computer birds.

The acting style could be wild at times, with Tiina in particular walking a tightrope of manic veal that occasionally fell off into outright absurdity. The wide eyes and over the top grin could come across as silly rather than someone full of religious fervour. Elsewhere, Justin irritated with his near permanent horny grin, while Ana made for a miserable protagonist who never came to be a character I remotely cared about. There wasn't a single likeable character, always a bad thing when you are meant to be rooting for the lead.
An indie film with less than ideal CG effects, but it still looked cohesive on screen. The story was basic and a little bit meandering, but the look of the lake and surrounding woods was a nice one, creating some atmosphere. The best part of Love Is the Monster was the rustic sounding score. Lots of simple drums, and the occasional inclusion of deep throat singing. This primitive sound really added to the vibe of the folk horror, making for the best part of the whole.

Despite being a serious horror, the cartoon-like antagonist with her exaggerated performance, coupled with the ever present digital birds, had me struggling to take this seriously. A budget Midsommar the setting and the music may have been on point, but the characters and more vitally the story, came to be lacking. Love Is the Monster became available to rent or own in the U.S.A on June 23rd, exclusively on Amazon Prime Video.

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Nightsiren (2022) - Horror Film Review

Nightsiren is a Slovakian folk-horror that was co-written and directed by Tereza Nvotová. It follows a chapter based progression that has key elements of the unfolding mystery revealed via flashbacks. On the surface this seemed like it was going to be a supernatural horror, though it can more keenly be seen as horror that stems from the superstitious beliefs of the inhabitants of a close-minded small rural town.

Sarlota (Natalia Germani) returns to her childhood town in rural Slovakia after receiving a letter from the mayor there stating that her deceased mother had left her an inheritance that she had to return to the town to claim. With the mayor away on vacation, Sarlota decides to stay a while, but finds that the forest cabin that her, her sister and her mother lived in had at some point in the past burnt down. She decides to instead move into the nearby cabin that once belonged to Otyla (Iva Bittová), an old woman who the locals had believed to be a witch. It is here that she meets Mira (Eva Mores), an outsider who had moved to a small hut on the edge of town in order to gather herbs from the nearby forest to sell online. The two soon strike up a friendship, and increasingly find themselves at odds with the highly superstitious townsfolk who still believe that Sarlota had been groomed by Otyla to be a witch as a child.

The movie is split over a series of chapters that both reveal further secrets from Sarlota's past as well as the increasing animosity she is getting in the present day. Nightsiren begins in a shocking way with a young Sarlota accidentally knocking her younger sister, Tamara off a cliff, with the sister apparently killed by the fall. Much of Sarlota's journey has her confronting her past self. This was a film that started off more supernatural than it turned out to be. It is established that Otyla was a witch, but this starts to become questioned more and more as past events are revealed to the viewer. There are parts of this that could be taken at face value to prove the existence of the supernatural, but it felt like this wasn't what was actually going on. The most supernatural point of the film comes at the end of the second act, but with the protagonists having imbibed a drugged drink this very trippy sequence felt much more likely to have been hallucinations.

Nightsiren wasn't a happy film, the main characters are seen with suspicion that leads up to a ramping up of threat and peril for them. Being so rural, the town is seen to take the law into their own hands, and there was an increasing feeling that events were going to reach a violent crescendo. The third act in particular was feel bad, with events cascading due to a series of bad luck and poor timing. There are plenty of folk-horror moments here, scenes of naked women dancing around bonfires deep in the woods, writhing around covered in day-glow paint, the repeated use of snakes that seem to appear from nowhere, and the persistent threat of the nasty townsfolk, including one uncomfortable attempted rape scene. There was a lot of non-sexual nudity in the film, including full frontal nudity, but this worked within the vibe of the film, not seeming excessive, and not at all feeling like it was there for base titillation. Instead this fed both into the context of witchcraft, and the feel of characters being closer to nature.
The plot I found interesting, with Sarlota and Mira standing out as great duel protagonists. The former had an interesting back story, with her being bald due to a history of trichotillomania, and having recently had a miscarriage that destroyed her relationship back in the city she came from. Love interest Tomás (Marek Geisberg) felt a bit underused with not much personality to him, though secretly gay Helena (Juliana Olhová) was an interesting if unlikeable character who was part of the catalyst for the townsfolk's increasingly dangerous behaviour.

While Nightsiren wasn't feel good in the slightest, and made for a sometimes unpleasant watch, I thought it was very well made, and created an atmosphere over its one hour fifty minute runtime that had me drawn into the beautiful location. Nightsiren came to ARROW at the start of June where it is streaming exclusively, a limited edition Blu-ray was also released at the same time.

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