By SHAWN MACOMBER
Starring Joey Collins, Ena O’Rourke and Jesse Milliner
Written and directed by Mike Taylor
Gravitas Ventures
“Everyone carries a shadow,” Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
Jung’s prescription? “Shadow work,” the process by which we acknowledge, tame and integrate our repressed shadow selves into a holistic whole self–the “essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge,” Jung wrote–has long served as a project of analytical psychology and, more recently, the wider self-development movement. However, as writer/director Mike Taylor’s THERE IS A MONSTER reminds us in stark and disquieting fashion, while we may sometimes work the shadows, in other terrifying instances the shadows work us.
The story begins well enough for our man Jack (Joey Collins). On the cusp of lucrative new milestones in his career as a photographer, married to an even-keeled, supportive woman (Ena O’Rourke) and living in a beautiful, chic home, he appears to be settling into a comfortable and fulfilling middle age. But, as not-so-subtly suggested above, there are shadows. First, we see Jack failing to resist the temptation of on-set adultery. He then appears similarly willpower-challenged when it comes to alcohol and random verbal cruelty. In each case, however, Jack declines to accept personal responsibility–he refuses, in essence, to see his shadow. Which is to say, while the photographer is willing to credit some implicit element of himself (say, his creative eye or command authority) for all the considerable good that flows to him, he spins any bad or destructive behavior as a conspiracy of outside forces and circumstances beyond his control.
And then, as if fed up with being ignored–and just as Jack seems ready to walk a more righteous path–the shadow self becomes more real, more assertive. Jack begins to see a dark and clearly malicious figure on the peripheries of his life, and it doesn’t stay there. As this vaguely humanoid darkness stalks closer and closer, not only do those closest to Jack fail to believe that, well, “there is a monster,” but his own body begins to break down in ways that leave him ever more vulnerable to attack.
As Jack’s spiral accelerates, THERE IS A MONSTER, which has an aesthetic somewhere between a Lifetime suspense movie of the week and a 1990s episode of THE OUTER LIMITS, becomes an interesting ethical window for its audience. On one hand, if we deny our own shadows, Jack is a completely unsympathetic victim receiving a brutal, yet not altogether undeserved comeuppance. On the other, if we have a self-awareness about the multi-hued darknesses we ourselves repress, he is something more akin to a sympathetic avatar; a cautionary tale about what horrors can befall us when we do not heed Jung and negotiate some kind of armistice with our own internal monsters…before they become external realities.
