Monica: Trace Lysette is a powerful presence in this understated family drama

Inside trans cinema, there are two wolves. One follows in the tradition of Oscar-winners like Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and The Danish Girl (2015); films that supposedly have good-intentions – often but not always biopics – that tend to foreground narratives of trans suffering. And then there’s a burgeoning, more adventurous kind of trans filmmaking: the unconventional horror of Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), or the experimental approach to documentary in Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando: My Political Biography (2023). These films are evolving into entirely different beasts – traversing new, more challenging landscapes of trans storytelling. 

It’s in this shifting landscape that we’re confronted with Monica, the latest film by Andrea Pallaoro. At first glance, the film seems simple: a story of the title character, a sex worker played by Trace Lysette, returning home to help her estranged, ailing mother Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson). But the film’s stark, stripped back style and minimal dialogue reveals something unexpected and challenging just below the surface.  

One scene shows Monica injecting hormones, something that, in other hands, might be made melodramatic, or even exploitative, but here the camera remains on the periphery. It’s indicative of how Pallaro approaches some of Monica’s most intimate moments. Throughout, there’s more of an emphasis on why we drift apart – so much of which is merely hinted at – than how we might come back together. 

Monica’s homecoming, like the rest of the film, seems to be going out of its way to subvert our expectations. The emotional register is quiet, but Pallaoro manages to capture just how vast the gulf between family members can become. When Monica first arrives home, she meets her mother’s carer, and the sister-in-law that she’s never known. She stands on the outskirts of Eugenia’s room, literally on the outside looking in. The camera lingers in close-up on her face in profile, with a background so dark it’s as if she’s worlds away from this bedroom. The characters around her talk in whispers just out of shot as it’s revealed that Eugenia doesn’t recognise Monica. It’s a striking moment, one that showcases the strength of Lysette’s performance. She does a lot with very little, all quiet gestures and uncertainty.  

The furtive relationship between Monica and Eugenia is the heart of the story, and watching these two strangers try to find their way back to each other reveals the delicate balancing act between the film’s minimalistic formalism and its emotional core. There is, at times, a danger of the camera language overpowering the storytelling. In one harrowing scene, a lost Eugenia weeps in her room, calling out for her mother. Monica holds her in an intimate moment of role-reversal, the child nurturing the parent. But the scene is shot in almost total darkness, with only the faces of the two women lit. Pallaoro never quite lets the viewer all the way in, leaving the performances at odds with the aesthetics.  

There are times when Monica can feel like a formal exercise stretched to breaking point, unsure of how to fit the story in with the rest of its technical, aesthetic concerns. But the performances from Lysette and Clarkson ground the film, showing that Monica is at its best when willing to confront its characters head on, an exploration of messy family dynamics that – rather than spelling everything out – has the confidence to leave things unresolved and unsaid. 

► Monica is in UK cinemas now.