This piece contains spoilers for Colossal.

If you don't like surprises, you might not like Colossal. The idea of a Godzilla-esque monster movie (huh?) starring Anne Hathaway as an alcoholic in need of a life makeover (OK, sure?) is already quite a lot to deal with. Connecting those dots is a challenge that seems to defy genre, but that hasn't turned audiences off. In fact, the film took in $126,000 after opening in just four theaters this weekend.

There's a reason this weird little movie is looking like the beginning of the Hathaissance—as unusual as it already seems, as it progresses, Colossal takes a hairpin turn and becomes a different kind of movie altogether. But let's start at the beginning: Gloria (Hathaway), whose problems with alcohol have driven her and her boyfriend (Dan Stevens) apart, returns to her parents' empty house to reassess and convalesce. She's only just arrived back home when Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), whom she went to school with, drives by in a pick-up.

Jason Sudeikis (Oscar) and Anne Hathaway (Gloria) in NEON

Oscar's good-looking, humbly traditional in the nice way (he's running the bar his dad used to own before he died). He's helpful, too, offering Gloria some work at the bar and lending her furniture while she finds her footing again. Whether he's a knight in fleece-lined denim or even just a nice guy to hang around with, he's a welcome arrival. As she meets his friends, Garth (a bitter husk with a heart of gold) and Joel (cute but dim), and builds a life amongst them, their friendship grows. Gloria trusts them all so much, in fact, that when she discovers that her actions power a huge, terrifying monster that's suddenly appeared in Seoul, they're the only people she tells.

It's classic "Can this fuck-up make good?" territory—think Young Adult or any number of 2000s rom-coms—with the addition of a dysfunction-as-creature metaphor that significantly ups the ante on growing up. Everything seems on track for a redemption story (albeit one with a Godzilla complex). Slowly, though, bad signs blossom. When Gloria shows interest in Garth, a jealous Oscar loses his temper. And his gifts keep coming with alarming speed and volume, escalating from a sofa bed and a TV to the full contents of a house. Finally, when Oscar realizes Gloria and Garth have slept together, he too gets drunk, and voila: Another monster is on the scene.

NEON

In Colossal, monsters aren't just metaphors: Gloria has her giant, green, horned problem to deal with. Oscar discovers he has his own monster: a giant robot that Seoul's residents must now also fear. And unlike Gloria, who has been trying to limit the amount of damage Godzilla-Gloria does halfway across the world, he's not afraid to use his power to get what he wants—which is to make Gloria promise never to leave. If she does? He'll rampage the South Korean capital, and there's no telling just how many people he'll hurt if he does that. There's something masterful in Oscar's manipulative ultimatum: If she wants to keep those people safe, she's going to have to stay put.

It's a cruel twist for a strange tale. Oscar—a seemingly kind, sensitive, and thoughtful man—is a textbook abuser. It might not look like it, but what he does to her is still abuse. Among the behaviors the World Health Organization defines as emotional abuse is "intimidation"—for example, destroying things—and threats of harm. In one of the film's most powerful scenes, Gloria freezes as the extent of his cruel gambit dawns upon her. She's trapped, by a man who'll do anything to keep her there. Colossal shows that nice guys like Oscar can be abusers, too. The film plays out Gloria's bind with a fierce tension, giving the film an unexpectedly painful dimension.

Director Nacho Vigalondo fed plenty of fascinating references into Colossal. He has spoken about his interest in kaiju eiga—the Japanese "creature features" that gave us Godzilla and Mothra. Vigalondo and Sudeikis also reportedly discussed the harassment of women online by Gamergate and the so-called alt-right while making this movie, and it shows in Sudeikis' ice-cold portrayal of a man full of hate. The point about abusive men is goosebump-raisingly made—all the more so for cropping up in what at first seemed like a wacky monster movie.

NEON

There's one more layer of monstrousness in Colossal, and I'm not sure it's intentional. Gloria and Oscar's psychodrama plays out in a small American town that could be pretty much anywhere. But the people their monster-counterparts end up hurting are in Seoul. There doesn't seem to be any specific reason why that city's the target, apart from a minor detail revealed at the end of the movie.

Perhaps, if it had been Tokyo instead, the cultural kaiju connection would have made a kind of sense. But as it stands, there's a kind of heedless racism to the terror Gloria and Oscar inflict. When Gloria tries to prove to her friends that she's the one controlling neo-Godzilla, she drunkenly falls over and accidentally kills, it's implied, many people. It's hard to imagine a white character being so careless if, say, Austin, Texas, was where her monster-self appeared. I mean, someone's aunt probably lives in Austin!

At least Gloria's upset by her thoughtless actions (tears, though, might seem like too little, too late to the people she killed), which were fueled by the buzz and fuzz of her alcohol dependency; Oscar doesn't seem to care at all who gets hurt as long as he's in control. Their friends do nothing to stop the bloodshed. Watching interpersonal strife play out between white people, with generic crowds of Asian people at risk, is disturbing, to say the least. In the film's ending, when the monsters finally leave, the people of Seoul applaud, not knowing that a drunk white woman and an abusive white man were to blame for what they've suffered.

Colossal's monstrous whiteness is one of the uglier takeaways in what's likely to be one of the year's more interesting films. It's unfortunate that this startling story about toxic masculinity is marred by an insensitive racial dynamic and a lack of awareness that who Oscar and Gloria's victims are is a problem. But in some ways, that's not a surprise at all. In fact, it seems fitting at this point in time that, in a movie that examines the destructive potential of men, white people's devil-may-care disregard pretty much goes without saying.

Estelle Tang Senior Editor Estelle Tang is the former senior editor of ELLE.com.

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