The premise of indie director Nacho Vigalondo's new film Colossal is so weird that it might just work. It's about loser millennial Gloria (Anne Hathaway), a party girl whose drunken binges cause a giant monster to awaken and rampage through Seoul. The debris of her personal life seems somehow psychically linked to the kaiju destruction.

Though its star Hathaway is an Academy Award winner and celebrity, Colossal snuck into the world without much fanfare. It just debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, and early reviews suggest it's uneven but definitely worth watching. The plot combines your typical "aimless thirtysomething" plot with giant monster action.

When Gloria's boyfriend dumps her, she returns to her hometown, broke and depressed. But during yet another drunken night at a bar, her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) comes back into her life. That's when she starts to realize that there's a mysterious connection between her drinking binges and the kaiju destroying Seoul. In a clip from the movie, we're introduced to our main characters, as they talk about how Gloria spilled her guts to Oscar when she was plastered the night before.

Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo, who began his career in Spain, is known for character-driven, bizarre movies with science fictional overtones. His feature film Timecrimes was about how a mysterious time traveler with a knife affects the rocky marriage of a couple whose unraveling relationship parallels our gradual realization that we're watching a time loop. Cerebral and dark, the movie was lauded for some of the same themes Vigalondo is tackling in Colossal: the interconnection between mundane personal problems and shocking, supernatural events.

Colossal joins a host of other recent kaiju flicks that link the shaggy dog stories of slacker millennials with giant monsters. Both Cloverfield and its sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane have progatonists who are straight out of "aimless young person" central casting. The heroes of the fantastic Korean kaiju flick The Host are a bumbling family of dorks, and even the paramilitary Jaeger pilots in Pacific Rim are dealing with daddy issues. And the first film from former indie director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One), Monsters, is about a disaffected war photographer who has to get a spoiled rich tourist out of Mexico when giant, glowing jellyfish monsters attack.

It's fascinating to contrast these second-wave kaiju movies with the ones that terrified audiences in the mid-20th century. Whether it was Godzilla in Japan, or giant ant epic Them in the United States, the focus was on a relationship between mega-beasts and the military industrial complex. Rooms of earnest scientists and generals calculated exactly how to defeat the Big Bads. Today, filmmakers seem more interested in how ordinary people would deal with a kaiju crisis.

Looked at another way, audiences are viewing kaiju in the context of new metaphors. While 20th century giant monsters were pretty much always symbols for the dangers of atomics, 21st century monsters often stand in for fears of terrorism and climate change. Consider how Cloverfield evoked New York after 9/11, and The Host's monster is spawned by ocean pollution. Monsters had a political message too--it takes place in the shadow of a great wall built between the US and Mexico, and its monsters are stirred up by firefights between rebels and the government.

Second wave kaiju movies blend the chaotic threats of globalization with personal chaos in the lives of regular people. Maybe this combination strikes a chord for audiences dealing with a world that's far more trashed and economically divided than the one their parents knew.

Colossal does not yet have a release date in the U.S.