Monster

Florida freeway prostitute Aileen Wuornos spent 12 years on death row before being executed in October 2002 for hitching rides with, and then murdering, six of her johns. Writer-director Patty Jenkins now exhumes Wuornos’ story with both startling and rather negligible results. We slither into Wuornos’ young adult life as she contemplates suicide under a freeway overpass. She enters into a lesbian affair and supports the relationship by hooking. When one of her tricks turns violent, she begins a killing spree that Jenkins deciphers as the oozing infection and daisy-chain reaction of child abuse. Actress Charlize Theron’s physical and emotional transformation into America’s first female serial killer is astonishing, but the film provides little revelation in a world where life is altered by chance meetings and a vicious cycle of Catch-22s, and one woman is smeared with guilt for things over which she had no control.