When this DVD arrived, my heart sank. It's been packaged and marketed like some kind of cheesy slasher movie when, in fact, it's quite intelligent and well-made. First hour is absorbing, with Vincent Cassel as terrific as ever as the eponymous monk, a deeply sympathetic figure, so when his fall from grace comes, it is all the more disappointing. The last half-hour unfortunately peddles many cliches of the horror idiom, though it never lapses into cheap sensationalism. Final spectacular sequence seems like an allegory of Christ in the wilderness. Basically the movie suffers from a kind of identity crisis, never quite knowing whether it's a spiritual biography or a penny dreadful.
Review of The Monk
