Monsters can find us wherever we hide.

Horror has always been an accommodating host to metaphor and allegory, and Monstrous makes itself at home in the genre, with its exploration of monsters both mundane and fantastical and a heightened sense of reality that hints at darker truths lurking beyond the shadows.

In 1950s California, Laura (Christina Ricci) and her seven‑year‑old son Cody (Santino Barnard) arrive after fleeing across the country to a secluded lakeside farmhouse. Their new life at first seems promising, but the isolation quickly brings more unease than comfort. Laura struggles to build a semblance of normality while fending off the attention of her landlord’s officious wife, Mrs Langtree (Colleen Camp), and the overly familiar handyman, Mr Alonzo (Lew Temple). As Cody begins to speak of a mysterious “lady from the lake” who visits him at night, Laura becomes convinced a dark presence lurks in the waters near their home.

Christina Ricci carries the film with the kind of poise and volatility that reminds you just how good an actress she is. The period setting wraps everything in a shimmering veneer of mid-century American optimism, but cracks show almost immediately. Domestic perfection is never more than a set-dressing away from dread, and the pristine surfaces can’t conceal the turbulence simmering beneath.

The horror element manifests in the form of an uncanny presence tied to the nearby lake. What could have been a stock monster-movie intrusion instead treated as a spectral harbinger, a shape that rises whenever denial begins to buckle. Sivertson and cinematographer Senda Bonnet shoot it less as spectacle and more as a reflection: the fear that something hidden will not stay that way. The film’s restraint here is its strength; shadows on the wall tell us as much as any visual effect.

Chrest’s script resists the easy temptation to itemise its meanings. Everyday objects – an old telephone, a mirror, a lullaby half-remembered – take on a resonance that edges towards the supernatural without ever letting us forget the very human distress at the story’s core. Even the moments of period kitsch feel pointed, a reminder that nostalgia is just another costume grief can wear.

The supporting cast orbit Ricci like fragments caught in her gravity. Santino Barnard plays Cody with an unsettling serenity, and Colleen Camp’s landlady exudes both homeliness and faint menace, perfectly pitched for a world where reality always seems just out of focus. Together they reinforce the idea that this isn’t a story about fighting a monster but about how monsters are made manifest when they’re called.

For some, the pacing may feel measured to a fault, but that slow unfurling is part of the film’s method. It invites you to notice the details, to sense when the environment isn’t behaving quite right. It’s a ghost story told through atmosphere and psychology rather than through shocks, and it rewards patience with a melancholy catharsis.