Monster Dyke

One of the things that every creative artist learns sooner or later is that things sneak into the work which one doesn’t intend to put there. Sometimes they pertain to recent external influences – other pieces of art one has seen, places one has been, people one has talked to. Sometimes their origin is wholly a mystery. On other occasions, they emerge from the subconscious like monsters from the id.

The sculptress in this film (played by Kaye Adelaide) is already aware that she’s creating a monster. That’s the idea. But there are things that she doesn’t know. She’s distracted, dealing with a guy who won’t stop calling her, who keeps asking to see her again when she’s pretty sure that he doesn’t care about her and is just fetishising the fact she’s trans – as if she were some exotic, erotic monster. Men like him annoy her but she doesn’t seem to have imagined any other option – until her female sculpture comes to life and sparks a lesbian awakening.

Monster Dyke packs an awful lot into just a few minutes. The Pygmalionesque sexual encounter is the least of it. There are questions here about the perceived monstrousness of queer bodies, the approach we might take to defining sexuality when dealing with alien orifices, and the deep, sometimes sexual affection for monsters which exists among fans of horror cinema. Watching Adelaide interact with the complex puppet – affectionately known a Annie – which stands in for sculpture, one is reminded of JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and his attempt to identify the ingredients that constitute an erotic interaction, separating them from bodies as they are conventionally understood. Here there are slender appendages, glistening lubricant, a point of entry which might perform multiple functions. The chemistry is there in the performances, enabling us to translate the physics.

Although nothing here is intended to look polished and complete – the sculpture is a work in progress – the quality of the special effects work is very impressive and the film is cleverly shot, inviting us to make an emotional connection with the monster and imagine its desires. It’s sufficiently convincing to have seriously disturbed some viewers when it screened as part of the 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival, but the encounter it presents is full of the joy of self-realisation, and if you’re not shy about a bit of monster action, it’s a treat.