Matt Black & Ryan Polly leverage our tech landscape into a new viral horror
In an era where doom-scrolling has become second nature, Monitor taps into a quietly unsettling idea, we’ve all seen disturbing things online, but what if the worst of it is being shielded from us? That premise fuels a slick, unnerving horror film that feels both familiar and yet sharply attuned to modern digital anxieties.
The film follows Maggie (Brittany O’Grady), a content moderator tasked with filtering out the internet’s most explicit and harmful material, a job that acts as a thin line of protection between the public and the truly grotesque. Working her latest batch, she encounters a strange video, one that spirals into a hypnotic, kaleidoscopic loop and reveals an unnerving figure staring back at her. Seed planted, the film leans into a curse-driven narrative where an entity, visible only through screens, begins to stalk Maggie and her coworkers, Gunner (Gunner Willis), Claudia (Sara Alexander), Faye (Ines Høysæter Asserson), Sariq (Viveik Karla), Hazel (Camila Bejarano Wahlgren), and their boss Isaac (Taz Skylar). Each having seen the tainted footage, and falling prey this specter as it seeks to claws its way into the world through their mounting fear.
It’s not hard to spot the film’s influences. Echoes of Ring, Lights Out, and Smile ripple throughout, and while Monitor doesn’t reinvent the genre, it executes its ideas with confidence and precision. Like Black Mirror, it reflects on our relationship with screens, but broadens the lens beyond smartphones to the countless monitors that shape our daily lives, weaponizing video doorbells, CCTV cameras, parking cameras on cars, and even baby monitors into portals for this entity to channel itself through.
What elevates Monitor is how it grounds its supernatural threat in something philosophical and reflective. The entity is a digital-age Tulpa, a thought-form whose power is sustained by fear and belief. It doesn’t just haunt, it spreads, leveraging attention, curiosity, and most pertinently the viral nature of online content to grow stronger. In that sense, the film becomes a commentary on our own behaviors, the way we consume, share, react, and perhaps strike online with the veil of anonymity it often provides.
Directors Ryan Polly and Matthew Black burnish their horror credentials further with a series of well-crafted set pieces, including a standout gas station sequence (drawing from their earlier short film), a shrouded cloud storage facility, and a nerve-shredding woodland finale built around motion-activated hunting cameras. The film rarely loses its grip. Its pacing is sharp, its tension carefully modulated, and its use of perspective, what characters see through screens versus what we see as viewers, creates an unsettling sense of indirect exposure. When the characters look, we look, ever seeking a portent of doom.
The creature itself is rendered in fleeting glimpses, its erratic, jerky movements making for genuinely chilling moments. Reflections, shadow and light are smartly leveraged to create tension and atmosphere. Horror never truly hits home unless you’re invested in the characters and the ensemble here adds emotional weight. O’Grady in particular delivers a particularly engaging performance as a woman clearly grappling with personal trauma and self-imposed penance through her work. The supporting cast helps flesh out the world, giving the film a human core that balances its high-concept horror.
Monitor may wear its inspirations on its sleeve, but it uses them damn effectively. With its blend of familiar tropes, modern anxieties, and inventive set pieces, it succeeds in doing what good horror should, making you uneasy not just in the moment, but long after the screen goes dark. With Monitor’s polish, potency, and viral premise, it’s also easy to imagine this being just the beginning of something larger.
