Anne Hathaway's Very Weird New 'Godzilla' Movie Confounds Critics

Anne Hathaway’s gone a bit leftfield with her latest movie, then.

Debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival, ‘Colossal’ stars Hathaway as Gloria, a young woman who moves from New York back to her hometown after losing both her job and her boyfriend, and having taken to the bottle.

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So far, so run of the mill… until she discovers that she has a strange psychic connection with a Godzilla-esque monster which starts tearing up Seoul in South Korea.

From 8pm each evening, the creature running amok on the other side of the world mirrors her own movements, flattening whole swathes of the city.

Obviously.

Speaking to reporters about her choice to jump on board, she said she wanted to find ‘something weird’, after having watched Ben Wheatley’s psychedelic English civil war thriller ‘A Field In England’.

“I did this one for my 16-year-old self,” she said.

“I would have loved this movie and felt so cool knowing it existed. I think we’re actually uniquely poised at this moment to be entering a time of post-genre.”

Helmed and written by Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo, it’s thus far confounded critics, though mostly in a good way.

Vanity Fair‘s review begins simply with ‘hm’.

“Here, Vigalondo seems to be setting up an easy metaphor: Gloria’s self-destructive behavior mirroring this beast’s ravaging of a major metropolis. And as that, Colossal works perfectly fine, if a bit too cutely,” writes Richard Lawson.

“Throughout all this, Hathaway is outstanding. She’s funny and poignant, the perfect kind of underdog champion. It’s my favorite performance of hers since, gosh, I don’t know when.”

Time Out‘s Tom Huddleston calls it ‘determinedly bizarre, psychologically inquisitive and in the end rather wonderful’.

Meanwhile, Collider‘s Adam Chitwood writes: “You’ve never really seen a movie like Colossal. It’s an alcoholism drama. It’s a dark comedy. It’s a kaiju movie. It’s all of these things in one, and thanks to a tremendous balance of tone from Vigalondo, it succeeds far more than it fails.”

However, some reckon it doesn’t go quite far enough into oddball territory to pull off what it wants to achieve.

In a two-star notice, The Guardian‘s Benjamin Lee calls it a ‘fascinating misfire’.

“It’s a tantalising missed opportunity because if you’re going to make a film about a woman with a psychic connection to a giant city-crushing monster, it should definitely be weirder than this.”

Also starring Jason Sudeikis, Tim Blake Nelson and ‘Downton’s Dan Stevens, there’s no UK release date just yet.

Watch the skies…

Image credits: Voltage Pictures/Getty