Blonde: Netflix’s Marilyn Monroe movie more slow-burn horror than conventional biopic

Blonde (R18, 166 mins) Directed by Andrew Dominik ***½

Screenwriter and director Andrew Dominik had Blonde in mind for over a decade.

The film is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ fictional novel on the life of Marilyn Monroe, which had been published to great acclaim and some controversy, in 2000.

Blonde is an immersive and engrossing portrait of – well, someone. Dominik toggles between scenes that are dreamlike and hallucinatory – and then images that come straight from a nightmare. But Blonde seldom settles into the expected rhythms of a biopic. If you’ve come to Blonde looking for a “film about Marilyn Monroe’s life”, then you have come to the wrong place.

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This is more slow-burn horror movie than a conventional biopic. Monroe was raped, assaulted, beaten and ripped off throughout her career and her earlier life. As a child, Norma Jeane Mortenson was abandoned by a father she never knew and abused by a mother who was always teetering on the edge of a breakdown. She spent more time in orphanages and children’s homes than she did with her mother Gladys Pearl.

The names may be drawn from history – and many of the incidents are broadly true. But Dominik treats this material as a fever-dream, or a Lynchian fantasy. Where real-life ends and invention begins is worse than blurred here. It is often treated as irrelevant.

It’s a troubling approach; to go looking for the merely cinematic within all this actual human cruelty and tragedy. But whether Blonde is ultimately as exploitative as the studio executives who preyed on the real Monroe, is never going to be an easily resolved argument.

What Blonde gets right, is an emphasis on how intelligent, insightful and flat-out talented Monroe was. Even within the confines of the roles she was offered, Monroe absolutely blazed with smart choices and she carved some indelible characterisations out of some average scripts. How much of her very best work was left on the editor’s floor, because those shots didn’t match the studio’s idea of what the public wanted, we will never know.

If she had been born a decade later, or had been surrounded by better people, it is heartbreaking to speculate on the actress and the person that Monroe could have become.

In the lead – and in nearly every shot – Ana de Armas is just as good as the trailer and publicity are suggesting. She vanishes into the role – or roles. The line between Norma Jean and the Marilyn she played is a constant theme of Blonde. Ana de Armas is convincing – and often devastating – as both. It’s a long way off, but an Oscar nomination seems a certainty.

Around de Armas, Bobby Cannavale as husband No. 2, Joe DiMaggio, is especially effective, playing a eventually tyrannical and abusive man as a figure lost in his own fame and incapable of dealing with its absence.

Blonde is exceptionally well crafted and assembled. Technically it is superb and the performances – de Armas especially – are uniformly wonderful. And yet, I still got to the end of the 166 minutes wishing they hadn’t bothered, or at least that they had stuck to the truth. That could have yielded a more admirable film than this.

Blonde is now available to stream on Netflix.