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Movie Post Mortem Closet Monster Movie Explained

Taylor Holmes
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Movie Post Mortem Closet Monster Movie Explained

I need to figure out how to generate more hours in the day. Literally. There way too many movies out there to talk about. Way too many fantastic ideas out there waiting to be unpacked and discussed. To be explained, to be dropped on the autopsy table and be disemboweled for our own education and learning. But I made my world much “worse” when I created this “Suggest a movie” widget you see at the bottom of your screen. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can find it right here. And don’t let my kvetching sway you from suggesting a movie for us to discuss. But holy cow… just coming off of a vacation, I’m officially in need of another vacation! hahahah. You guys have way too many movies for me to cover!

Regardless of me complaining about having too many amazing movies to watch, I will say that Remi recently posted a movie that he wanted us to watch, unpack, and discuss. And I found it really interesting. But I have decided I need to figure out how to create mini-write-ups. Or Micro-Explainers or something, just so I can get more of them done! So today, I’m just going to give the slimmest of summaries about the movie, and then delve straight into the unpacking portion. That way, maybe I’ll be able to start getting more of these movies off my plate! But know – the rest of this movie after the trailer will 100% be spoiler-filled.

 

Closet Monster Summary:

A child, Oscar (played by Connor Jessup) witnesses a violent attack on a gay fellow student that leaves him paralyzed. Several years later, this teen is petrified of what his father will think if he were to find out about his own sexuality. When he falls for Wilder (Aliocha Schneider), a wild co-worker, he is forced to confront his worst possible fears. All while Oscar continues to try and get accepted into a special-effects makeup school, Oscar faces fears and failures at every turn until he eventually he is forced to admit to his biological mother (that divorced and remarried after Oscar’s father was horrible to her) that he always feels alone. Which pushes the conflict to a crescendo, in a mind altering conclusion.

Closet Monster Movie Explanation and Theories:

The movie opened with a key detail I think that most people probably missed. As a child, Oscar can’t sleep, and he asks his father to give him a dream. And so his father (played by Aaron Abrams), in a scene more similar to an incantation than a bed time story, tells Oscar a dream. This dream is a dream about our hero Oscar, meeting and vanquishing vampires in a cemetery.  This scene is the frame within which the rest of this movie is told. In other words, 100% of this movie is about Oscar meeting vampires in a graveyard and vanquishing them. His vampires? His fears about his sexuality. His hateful father. His worries about getting accepted into to college and not being seen as a failure. I am sure much is made about the hamster and the fantastical elements of this movie created by Stephen Dunn (as the writer and director). But the fantastical elements are simply internalizations of Oscar himself.

And yet, Closet Monster is obviously intending to portray the struggles of gay teens in the most realistic ways imaginable. Peter Madly, Oscar’s father is shown as a truly loving father that cares desperately for his son. And yet he doesn’t have the emotional maturity necessary in order to help his son. Nor can he be the father that Oscar needs him to be. It is Peter’s own fears and incapacitating emotional stoppages that keep him from properly supporting his son in the ways in which Oscar needs him to be there for him. And this movie really is all about this discovery for Oscar. The moment when you realize as a child that really? Your parents are mostly powerless in this big big world. And Stephen Dunn has even said as much:

“I wanted to make a film about the moment when you discover that your parents aren’t the superheroes that you thought they were… Peter, does really, truly love his child but he’s ultimately not mature enough to be the father that Oscar needs him to be. Peter’s own deluded and internalized homophobia keep him from properly protecting his son. But I wanted to show that there are two sides of that coin, that there is no villain, so there is no monster in the film. The monster in the film is so many different things; it’s about internalized hate, really, in Oscar’s own life.”

So if the movie really is about Oscar’s discovery that his parents really are impotent to help and protect him, then what is the meaning of that crazy talking hamster that plays such an important role throughout the movie?!? The hamster is Oscar’s motherly subconscious encouraging him and pushing him to do the right thing. His loneliness manifests itself in the talking hamster, but it also is one of the truly positive role models in his life. Originally, Dunn considered making the voice of the hamster a Siri voice, but the voice wasn’t motherly enough. It didn’t carry the emotional support necessary for the part. And so that is why Isabella Rossellini was brought in to do the voice. 

Which brings us to the number one big question that I’m sure is plaguing most viewers of this movie. What could the rebar possibly mean?

At the conclusion of the movie we see Oscar and his mother and father in the same place again for the first time since the beginning of the film. And that is important, because finally Oscar has the courage to remove the fear that has been haunting him his entire life so far, in the form of rebar from his gut. Why rebar? Because it was the weapon that paralyzed the child earlier in the film. It was the physical embodiment of fear that had stayed with him since witnessing that attack. And when he is finally able to pull the rebar out, it signified his ability to overcome the debilitating threat of being found out to be gay. By his father. By his friends. Classmates. Everyone.

And the significance of his taking his fear, and using it as a weapon against his own father is important too. In that it was Oscar taking the threat and using it back against itself. He restrained himself from hurting his father. But he instead used it to hedge in the threat – quarantine it if you will. Believe it or not, this movie idea originated with the rebar by Stephen Dunn. He had this idea of his main character extracting this weapon out of himself and then using it against his chief threat.  And it was this idea upon which the rest of the movies fantastical elements proceeded from. (The hamster etc.) So the entirety of the movie is about working through and progressing past this horrifying idea in his own mind.

Or maybe it was just about talking hamsters and magical rebar? Dunno. What did you think of the movie?

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Taylor Holmes

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2 Responses

  1. I just found this movie in fall 2019, and have watched several times now. Your discussion pretty well covers the framework and how the pieces fit together. I really like how Stephen Dunn has put it all together, including the music that is used, which really helps with the moods, tones, and weaving it together. I also like the use of special effects that blend reality and Oscar’s subconscious internalizations, as well as some of the offset dialogue. It all makes for one of the better films I have seen in the past 6 months. Again I mention the music, which to me is often integral to the film. The soundtrack songs, as well as musical score are just great.

  2. The question I came here looking to get answered but wasn’t touched on was what the end meant. That is clearly not that alternate art school FOGO that his mom talked about. It’s a tiny, white, totally abstract, totally impossible house in a totally impossible location as it sits at the very edge of a small, stony crag barely above a sea so tumultuous it seems on the verge of swallowing that house and that small, stony crag even in that totally clear weather, so impossible because the first storm, and that impossible, weird house is gone. That’s not a school. That’s not a school dorm. That’s not anything that even remotely resembles any kind of student housing. It’s so upscale that even if it could exist, it would be impossible for him to ever afford. So what’s the ending about? What’s it mean?

    The only thing I can come up with is it’s heaven, him in his afterlife? So did he die? Did his dad kill him when he kicked his dad into the closet? Did the titular “Closet Monster” (i.e., his dad) kill him, not his hamster, Buffy? Was Buffy dying really him dying? Or did he OD at that party and die? Or when he vomited up all those screws into the sink at the part, screws they’d shown earlier at the hardware store where he worked and that he apparently ate, did we find out he had pica and had been swallowing metal in order to physically manifest the psychological manifestation of that rebar and that’s what killed him, some kind of hemorrhage from giving himself all those stomach pains we kept seeing throughout, which weren’t imagined but were real, by eating metal? Was there a point where he died and everything after that point was prologue to his life and prelude to that idyllic, if tumultuous, if impossible, afterlife?

    Also, the rebar. The boy at the beginning wasn’t paralyzed by the rebar. He was paralyzed by those boys kicking him. It was clear that those boys used the rebar to anally rape him with, not beat him with. We saw the one boy gripping the rebar and thrusting it back and forth. Then we saw the rebar get dropped and the blood dripping from just the end. My feeling was that the movie, for whatever reason, softened this aspect, made it less obvious. But when the rebar started coming through Oscar’s stomach, with how long it was, to me it was obvious that it was coming through from his anus, like how that rebar when used to rape the boy may have gone in so far that it might’ve been similarly visible pressing out from his stomach had anyone been looking. So that seen where Oscar pulls it out of his stomach, I did have expect him to reach back and pull it out of his backside, maybe that being how Stephen Dunn originally conceived it happening but movie studios, focus groups, etc. really not on board with a teenage boy pulling a giant piece of rebar out of his butt.

    I felt the same way about him attacking his dad with the rebar, that same feeling you get when you can tell a movie studio has switched from the ending you just know a movie was heading towards all to make the movie more appealing to a broader audience. I felt like the scene really went that he beat his dad with it, maybe even to death, thus killing the monster in the closet, though not really since I think maybe he himself was dead at that point, meaning he was really only killing what his father represented (i.e., homophobia, insanity (his name is “Madly” after all), immaturity, etc.), but that the studio or whatever said no, so we got switched to this Pollyanna version where they walk it back and he only beats that birdhouse or whatever it was next to his dad.

    So, anyway, the end makes no sense at all, the house, the crag, the waves, sending Buffy off Frodo-style, unless he’s dead and that’s the afterlife. And if that’s the afterlife, then him getting picked up by Wilder off the bathroom floor, him being taken care of by Wilder, and Wilder being unusually clued in and guiding him through him finally facing and accepting his sexuality and then going from there to seeing his life destroyed in that room, to then having his abandoning mother most unexpectedly unabandon him by most unexpectedly showing up to save him from his dad, the Closet Monster, and then facing down that Closet Monster in battle, I think slaying him, but softened for viewers to merely imprisoning him by chasing him into the house and sealing him inside by threading the rebar through the doorhandle and twisting it like a twist-tie, something else that leads me to believe it wasn’t real since that would’ve required Superman strength. I’ve worked with rebar. Rebar flexes a bit, but it doesn’t bend and it certainly doesn’t twist. It’s used to reinforce concrete with the thousands and thousands of pounds of torsion strength required to keep skyscrapers from tumbling to the ground. There’s no way in hell a 17-year-old boy bent it and twisted it like that. But if I’m completely off base, I’d love to have you email me and tell me what you think the ending meant, what all this stuff meant (i.e., from dream to vomit screws to impossible house).

    Oh, and another thing I’d like explained is the moment he picks up the wooden stake at the end, the stake to kill the imaginary vampires in the graveyard in the dream his father gave him and the stake he fell short of using to kill the real vampires in the graveyard that paralyzed that boy, which dream you say is what the movie is entirely about or framed by, he puts it back down and uses the rebar instead? Also, if the movie really is entirely framed from beginning to end by the first scene and the dream his father gave him of killing vampires in the graveyard, why wasn’t it call Graveyard Vampires instead of Closet Monster?

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