Martha the Monster
2017 · 15m
Directed by Christopher Weekes
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, romance
Tones: melancholic, tender, whimsical
Martha, a lonely young woman who performs in a monster suit, goes looking for ordinary connection and finds a date as strange and tender as she is.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to see this as a twee indie romance, but Weekes is actually doing something weirder—using the monster suit as a genuine tool for vulnerability instead of metaphorical window dressing, which somehow makes it less clever and more honest than it has any right to be.
There's a lineage here that traces through creature-feature intimacy and the outsider-romance tradition, but Weekes commits to formal restraint rather than mining it for sentiment, letting the whimsy serve the emotional architecture rather than the reverse.
The decision to keep Martha *in* the suit for the entire emotional arc—never removing it as a reveal or climactic catharsis—is what makes this work; it reframes the whole film from a story about shedding a false self into one about being met exactly as you are.