Director: Matt Vesely
Directed by Matt Vesely, "Monolith" traps a disgraced journalist inside her own home office as a podcast investigation into a mysterious object starts to unravel her sense of reality.
What is Monolith about?
Forced out of mainstream reporting after a scandal, a young journalist retreats to podcasting as a last chance to prove she still has instincts worth trusting. She starts pulling threads on scattered reports of an unexplained black object turning up in ordinary homes across the country, each sighting tied to a strange disturbance in the owner's life. Working entirely from her house, using only phone calls and old recordings, she reconstructs the object's trail piece by piece, and the deeper she digs, the more the separate accounts start rhyming with one another in ways that feel too precise to be coincidence. Isolation becomes both her method and her undoing, as the story she's chasing begins to bend the line between reporting and personal reckoning, culminating in a discovery that recontextualizes everything she thought she understood about the object and about herself.
Cast & crew
Lily Sullivan carries almost the entire film alone, delivering a performance built on voice, silence, and the small physical tics of someone talking to phones and microphones for most of a runtime. The supporting cast, heard largely rather than seen, including Ling Cooper Tang and Erik Thomson, works through recorded calls and interviews that Sullivan's character assembles, giving the film an unusual structure where dialogue partners rarely share the frame.
Context & significance
Released in 2023 out of Australia, "Monolith" belongs to a small but distinctive strand of low-budget science-fiction that leans on formal restraint rather than spectacle, telling its story almost entirely through one actor and a single location. Vesely uses the podcasting format as more than a gimmick, structuring the mystery around the rhythms of audio journalism, recorded calls, silences, and reconstructed timelines, to build dread without ever showing the object directly for long stretches of the film.
Where & how to watch
"Monolith" is available on K-Time with a free account login, dubbed into Persian for viewers who prefer to watch in Farsi. K-Time's Farsi-language interface is designed for the Iranian diaspora, making it straightforward to discover and stream a film like this alongside the rest of the catalog.