Lost Highway

• One of the socially redeeming features of mass media has always been its communal aspect, the fact people are drawn together into a shared experience based on network programming.
• Of course, this, in the English-speaking world at least, has been driven by the desire for profit through selling advertising space to corporations.
• Her investigation takes her across the globe and back through time to the 1980s and the Cold War.
• We watch as she interviews people, often using ethically dubious practices, and assembles the material entirely from inside her home.

What is the monolith?

• We never definitively find out (which some viewers will surely find annoying).
• The obscurity with which the film represents the bricks seems to call for this kind of allegorical reading.
• Joining Sullivan are the voices of some well-known Australian actors including Damon Herriman, Kate Box and Erik Thomson.

The strange solitude of interpersonal communication

• The strange solitude of interpersonal communication in the global information economy underpins the whole thing, and the screen is replete with a plethora of different technologies reflecting this – talking head videos online, audio recording, editing and streaming, mobile phones, smart houses, close-ups of digital text.
• At the same time, we watch her go about the day-to-day business of living – making food in the kitchen, eating, showering at night – her deep solitude foregrounded throughout.
• Despite this, Monolith remains an effective fantasy-thriller, remarkably engaging given its limitations – one location, one actor (well, two, including pet turtle Ian).
• It’s also refreshing to see a high concept Australian film, as opposed to the usual social realist and period dramas.

Ari Mattes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.