Review of Blonde (2022) by Moviemitch96 — 02 Oct 2022

Ana De Armas stars as Marilyn Monroe in this biopic that serves as a fictionalized account of her troubled life based off a book by Joyce Carol Oates. The film almost immediately generated controversy over this due to the fact that the novel infamously exploited and dehumanized Monroe through graphic and explicit sexual depictions of her.

So it came as no surprise that this film received a rare and rather hardcore NC-17 rating, depicting everything ranging from smutty and objectifying sex scenes to implied rape and domestic abuse. While De Armas gives it her all, her rather obvious Cuban roots squeak in all too often through her accent throughout the film, try as she did to hide it.

And while the film started out intriguing enough, with frequently changing aspect ratios and switching back and forth between black and white and color sequences, this quickly became a gimmicky and stylized crutch that the film fell back on all too often in order to overcompensate for its abstract narrative style.

Overall, De Armas shines as bright as she can with what material she is given, but the film's downer mood and tone, rough and misogynistic handling of Monroe, an unearned rather lengthy runtime, and overuse of aspect ratio switch-ups and black and white/color sequences make this a thoroughly uneven and scattershot misfire of a film.