What a difference a day makes. When we first meet Sonia Bonet (Jana Raluy) it’s nighttime, and she has been awoken by the grunts of her ill husband who has fallen off the bed in pain. The paramedics who arrive tell her that his condition will worsen, but she is confident he will recover after he starts a new expensive treatment. All she needs to do is move her husband’s medical appointment up, to have his insurance approve the treatment as fast as possible. The following day, after being put on an interminable hold on the phone, she heads to the insurance company with her teenage son Darío (Sebastián Aguirre Boeda), where she plans to get her husband’s doctor’s (Hugo Albores) approval. When she arrives, she is welcomed with endless refusals. It’s Friday and everyone is desperate to leave for the weekend. So when the doctor goes home, she follows him.
Her already terrible day slowly spirals out of control when she pulls a gun out of her handbag and takes the doctor hostage. Desperate to save his life he washes his hands off the responsibility and tells her she should be talking to the insurance company’s executives instead. Before the day is over, Sonia will have met the company’s top executives (played by Daniel Giménez Cacho and Emilio Echeverría), a notary (Ilya Cazes) and a shareholder (Verónica Falcón), all of whom have their leisurely lives interrupted by one of the faceless people who represent nothing but monthly checks to them.
Adapted by Laura Santullo, from her eponymous novel, A Monster with a Thousand Heads, is a taut, tense, moral fable that does more than encompassing the inhumanity inherent in bureaucracy. It also acknowledges that the situation has reached a point where little can be done, can the executives be blamed for not knowing everyone personally? Should desperate people reach out to them in person? How did we even let the business of health become an actual business?
Sensitively directed by Rodrigo Pla, who goes for the jugular and leaves no room for facile sentimentality or cheap genre tricks, A Monster with a Thousand Heads will undoubtedly be called a thriller by some. And it would make sense to try to box it into that category, after all we have a desperate person with a gun, running against time and trying to accomplish something. What Pla captures so chillingly is the fact that what seem to be thriller conventions, are actually part of the daily lives of millions of people in Latin America and Mexico, for whom violence has become a custom. Sonia’s story might seem outlandish, and it certainly is much more noble than many of the reasons why people pull out guns on others, but in a part of the world run by drug trafficking, gangs and corrupt politicians, the monster of the title has heads that certainly go beyond those wearing health insurance crowns.
By default Pla also captures the devastation that occurs when violence becomes the only option. With a pinch of very dark humor he shows us how the middle class is affected by the poor regulations of those who hold the economic power. When at a point we see a health club clerk ask Sonia for an ID card, not knowing that he is about to let in a potential killer, we can’t help but smirk at the senselessness in how we assign importance to things, and we can’t help but think that this unnamed clerk will also most likely lose his job because of this. Sonia has little time or regard for the havoc she wreaks in her path, she doesn’t even stop to think about her own future, but Pla certainly has made a film that evokes much empathy.
It would be unfair to review the film without mentioning the commanding performance by Raluy, whose Sonia seems to be almost possessed by the spirit of someone she doesn’t recognize. Her movements and reactions are so in the moment, that she could easily fool us into thinking this was shot in real time. Her Sonia is a neorealist heroine that wouldn’t feel out of place in a de Sica film, her plea so urgent, despite the clumsiness of its execution, that we are compelled to call her saintly. She is there to slay a terrible monster, the tragedy lying in the fact that she doesn’t know she already has been swallowed by it.
