Kids will be kids

What happens when children are left alone in the wilderness?

MONOS ★★★ 1/2 out of 5

Cast: Sofia Buenaventura, Moises Arias, Julianne Nicholson

Director: Alejandro Landes Duration: 1 h 42 m

The random shot of a pig’s head in Monos may strike some as a little too on-the-snout a reference to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. But in every other respect this is a truly original and contemporary fable of what can happens when children are left to their own devices in the wilderness.

The filmmaker is Colombia’s Alejandro Landes, and the language spoken by the young gun-toting cast is mostly Spanish, so it’s tempting to see this as an allegory for his country’s decades-old FARC guerrilla movement, which has been in an uneasy ceasefire since 2016.

But you don’t need to know any history or politics to feel for the teenage insurgents at the dark heart of the story.

Their organization is only ever referred to as “The Organization,” and its members use nicknames like Wolf, Swede, Rambo and Smurf. Their mission: to guard a foreign prisoner (Julianne Nicholson).

They are left on their own for what feels like weeks at a time, occasionally receiving orders by radio or in person from someone called Messenger, who looks barely older than his charges.

In the opening, the child soldiers are camped near an imposing rock face.

Messenger arrives with a dairy cow, on loan from someone sympathetic to their cause (whatever that is).

Unfortunately, the animal is accidentally killed, and the kids decide they might as well eat it.

This also sets up the first of many human deaths in the film, which takes a decidedly unromantic view of its characters; later, Nicholson seems fully prepared to kill a child to escape their clutches.

The bare-bones screenplay never explains how these children got here, and the camera seldom leaves the beautiful but dangerous natural setting, as the troop is forced to relocate to a deep jungle hideout after an attack.

And with few clues as to the time period, they could as easily be in a post-apocalyptic future as the present day.

(A bizarre reference to gummy bears snaps that possibility, however.)

The actors are mostly first-timers or little known, although you may recognize 25-year-old Moises Arias, whose credits include Ender’s Game and the decidedly more lighthearted kids-in-the-wilderness tale The Kings of Summer, from 2013.

When he tries to take control of the group, you feel for the youngster, trying to make the best of a seemingly impossible situation, and make sense of a random set of rules.

The movie is as emotionally powerful as it is physically beautiful.