Final Rating: 1.5/5
From Costa Rican director Neto Villalobos Brenes, Love is the Monster follows a Grandmother (Paulina Garcia) living in a post-apocalyptic world who desperately clings to her relationship with her Granddaughter (Ericka Reikendorf). While Villalobos Brenes presents a topical twist on dystopia, flat and static characters prevent the film from taking off.
The film takes place in a world ravaged by an unspecified plague. In this post-apocalyptic setting, society is marked by a sharp class divide. Characters are either members of suburban nuclear families, or all-purpose servants, who stand out of the way with teal maid uniforms, usually armed with rifles. The class divide openly leads to friction: while our suburban leads’ biggest worry is an upcoming birthday party for the Granddaughter, a paramilitary group of former maids hides outside the perimeter of the town, threatening to abduct children.
Though Love is the Monster sets the stage for inter-class conflict, the film is more focused on Grandmother’s place within her own class. Grandmother is independent to a fault, taking on tasks like picking up Granddaughter from school and buying her pets without consulting the girl’s mother. She is also forgetful, locking herself out of her car or various rooms on multiple occasions. Finally, all of her friends are dying, some of them from illness, which makes her a potential health risk.
She’s dangerous and unpleasant, with vanishingly few peers interested in sticking up for her. As she repeatedly runs afoul of her daughter and others around her, she is increasingly ostracized from her community. Of course, she’s neither interested in nor able to join the servant class. There’s just no place for her.
Garcia puts in a decent enough performance as the Grandmother. She’s warm enough that the audience sympathizes with her, while also being prickly enough that it’s clear why people around her wouldn’t. That said, there’s not much to her character. She’s the lead, but only barely grows or changes by the end. Later actions that might be shocking in a deeper character study of a good woman turning bad instead feel hollow here. As if the actions of her “darker turn” could have happened at any time and resulted in little change to later events.
Visually, the film isn’t significantly more impressive. Love is the Monster takes place across sparse locations: an abandoned villa, a run-down schoolhouse, miles of empty forest. While it’s effective at communicating a dead world, it’s boring to look at.
Overall, Love is the Monster is unremarkable. The characters are flatly written, even if the performances are varying degrees of fine. The world is visually unappealing and too ill-defined to be interesting.
There’s familiarity to Villalobos Brenes’ setting. A world-ending illness gives way to a society marked by fear, leading to submission to a strict hierarchy, and an eventual rebellion against that order. That’s the foundation for a topical social commentary in 2026, but Brenes’ execution falls flat.
Love is the Monster was seen during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Thank you to Gat PR for the screener.
