A Monster With A Thousand Heads (2016) -Rodrigo Pla

Rodrigo Pla's A Monster With A Thousand Heads is a lean, well-paced,  angry film which uses a thriller type narrative to loudly deliver a socio-political commentary on healthcare,  focusing specifically on the slow turning, cold mechanics of bureaucracy.  The story is centered around a desperate woman in Sona, who has just received news that her husband's cancer has become more aggressive, progressing to the terminal stage.  Racing to secure approval from her insurance company, Sona finds her timely request met with indifference.  As this indifference and neglect grows, Sona snaps, responding to her primal nature to take care of her family by becoming increasing violent, intent on saving her husband.  A Monster With A Thousand Heads is a deeply humanizing portrait of a woman pushed to the edge by beaucracy, with the film beautifully revealing the inhumanity that is merely a biproduct of large corporations or government organizations.  Running about 80s minutes in length, A Monster With A Thousand Heads wastes very little time unraveling it's narrative, with the filmmakers creating a well structured story out of this straightforward narrative.  While I would argue the film could have been clearer in establishing the shortfalls of the insurance company in the beginning, there is no denying the tragic plight of Sona,  a character who feels abandoned by modern medicine and bureaucracy, simply fighting for her husbands life.  While the socio-political commentary around healthcare has been done before and better (Danis Tanovic's An Episode In the Life of An Iron Picker for example), what I found so fascinating about A Monster With A Thousand Heads is how it reveals the overall lack of empathy society, and humanity, can have when trauma or pain does not directly effect them.  Throughout A Monster With A Thousand Eyes the filmmakers routinely focus on Sophia's increasingly hostile plight through the eyes of various by-standers, routinely focusing on this outsider perspective.  From the doctors' receptionist, to two young woman in an elevator who blindly enter into the fray, to a simple gym goer who witnesses Sonia's hostility from across the locker room, all these characters' serve an understated purpose, exhibiting the sharp contrast between Sona's personal struggle and the colder, unaffected bistanders perspective.  It's an interesting touch, and id argue it elevates A Monster With A Thousand Heads above mere healthcare commentary and more into the larger commentary of humanities overall lack of pathos, with bureaucracy just being something that enables this detachment from ones we have no personal investment in. In the end, A Monster With A Thousand Heads is a powerful story told in an inventive yet straightforward way, being a film that uses the emotional intensity of a thriller to comment on socio-political issues about healthcare, as well as larger issues about humanities over detachment from one and other.

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