Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that composer Michael Giacchino has turned director. His geeky film fandom helped him speak the same language as regular collaborators J.J. Abrams or Brad Bird, and he made a fun debut with short film Monster Challenge back in 2018. Now he’s made a slight but entertaining Marvel TV special, introducing some of Marvel’s monster favourites via a sort of Universal horror pastiche.
The setting is the funeral of a famed monster hunter, where his fellows gather to pay their respects and, not incidentally, compete for the right to wield his famed anti-monster Bloodstone. Among the guests are the mysterious Jack (Gael Garcia Bernal) and the dead man’s estranged daughter, Elsa (Laura Donnelly). They will have to survive a night in the family’s stylish graveyard labyrinth – a must-have home feature – surviving one another as well as a mysterious beast trapped in the complex.
It’s a cool setting, this modernist maze, and Giacchino has assembled a visually diverse cast so it’s always clear who’s who, even if not what exactly they are up to. He shoots the film in a crisp, silvery black-and-white that beautifully recalls his 1930s inspirations, and it will not surprise you to know that the score is on point. There's even a fun monster twist on Giacchino's Marvel fanfare.
The story is slight, however, even for a 52 minute film, and if it's meant to launch Jack Russell (his actual name) or anyone else, it isn't yet obvious how they'd mesh with the rest of the MCU, beyond perhaps whatever Blade introduces as a theme. Still, Bernal is charismatic enough that we look forward to seeing him build on these relationships next. It's good to see wild swings like this, with Marvel trying something stylistically different and playing all the wide, wild notes of their comic range.
