Blonde (2022)

Blonde is special because it doesn’t try to “sum up” Marilyn Monroe so much as plunge you into the feeling of her myth—an unsettling, dreamlike fever of fame where glamour and dread share the same spotlight. Ana de Armas gives a fearless, deeply human performance that captures both the icon’s radiance and the private fragility beneath it, while Andrew Dominik’s bold, shape-shifting visuals make the film play like a haunted poem about how Hollywood looks at women. It’s mesmerizing in the way it commits to its perspective: audacious, stylized, and emotionally raw, more impression than biography. Fair warning, it’s punishingly intense and full of explicit, disturbing material, but if you can meet it on those terms, it’s an unforgettable piece of acting and filmmaking you won’t stop thinking about.

Blonde is aiming for a nightmarish, art-house tragedy about the cost of fame, using Marilyn Monroe as a symbol of a person split in two by Hollywood’s machinery. The problem is it often feels less like insight and more like endurance cinema: scene after scene of humiliation and trauma that can come off exploitative, with pacing that’s punishingly long and emotionally numbing. Ana de Armas is committed and the film has striking, sometimes hypnotic imagery, but the script’s fixation on suffering can reduce its subject to misery rather than a full human being. If you want a nuanced biopic or even a balanced fictionalized portrait, this likely isn’t for you; if you can handle extremely distressing content and are open to a bleak, impressionistic descent, it may land as a grim mood piece rather than a story.