Monster

Rating: 9/10 (30 April 2016)

When you see Aileen Wuornos and hear that she is a Daytona Beach prostitute and serial killer, you would probably expect her to be absolutely out of her mind. And you'd be right, to some extent, but you wouldn't expect that she had big dreams at one point in life, and all she really wanted to do was have one person to love. In fact when she seemed to almost accidentally stumble into becoming a prostitute at a young age, when she dreamed of becoming rich and famous, and expected to just stumble into fame as well. Soon enough she had become a full blown hooker, and she seemed to do the same when she became a serial killer. And Charlize Theron seems to completely inhabit this human being with a damaged soul. She not only physically transformed herself, but mentally as well. She is not the beautiful Charlize Theron that we've seen before. All of the performances in the film are fantastic, but Charlize Theron completely becomes this new person and there's almost no other performance in film that matches her's in this one
So Aileen's downfall started out when she was trying to get money to share with her new girlfriend, Selby Wall. She was "hooking" and happened to get into the wrong man's car. She got into the car of a sadistic psychopath, and he rapes her and tortures her, and definitely would've killed her if she didn't kill him first. She hides this from Selby, because she knows Selby is like the old Aileen. Selby believes people are good and Aileen doesn't want to take that away from her. She tries to quit hooking, but discovers she has dug herself too deep into a hole she can't get out of. After being raped and almost murdered, then being rejected by every job because of her lack of credentials, she begins to lose hope in herself. She finally confesses that she murdered the man to Selby, and decides to go back to hooking. But, when she gets in the car with the next man, she seems more nervous, more paranoid. The editing becomes closer and quicker, with intense music in the background, just like it did when she killed the first man. Suddenly she kills the man. She is then at home with Selby, and this is when the guilt begins to eat away at her, but it got them money, and the money gave them happiness, so she continues to kill. We see that she first needs to convince herself that the person is bad in order to kill him, and if she can't do that, she can't kill him. But she begins to kill nicer people, one of them a man that she thinks is out to get her because he has a gun, when it is only revealed that he is a cop. Next she gets in the car of a man that is a genuinely nice person with a family, who doesn't want to hook up with her, yet when he sees her pistol, she feels that she has to kill him, even though she doesn't want to. This is the most painful scene in the movie. From there it is all downhill for Aileen and Selby, and it all culminates to one heartbreaking phone call between Selby and Aileen, when it pans over to show cops in the same room listening to Selby, revealing that Selby is turning her in by getting a confession from her.
Was she a bad person? Yes. But she was also genuinely scarred and damaged from a horrible childhood. We learn she was kicked out of her house, beat by her dad, and raped at the age of 8, among other things, yet for a long while she truly believed in herself and that things would get better. The truth is, in the end, all she really wanted was to be with the one person she ever seemed truly loved in the world. This is a hopeless, cynical film, about a similarly hopeless and cynical one, but it is a fantastic and devastating film as well.