Here is a horror film about the life of Marilyn Monroe, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates: a glossily expensive nightmare about the great movie actor as bleating sacrificial sex-lamb on the altar of celebrity. Andrew Dominik’s movie throbs with her radioactive victimhood.
It benefits from a showstopping central performance by Cuban-Spanish actor Ana de Armas, who eerily incarnates the legendary star with a weird little hint of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, although it is Marilyn’s impending and repeated childlessness which is shown as the real emanation of evil. Like Polanski’s stricken heroine, she is surrounded by a secretly complicit male priest-caste: a brotherhood of misogyny, exploitation and rape, including doctors, agents, producers, directors, early lovers (the movie amplifies Hollywood-Babylon-type rumours about Charlie Chaplin Jr and Edward G Robinson Jr into a full-tilt bisexual threesome), two husbands – Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller – and one president, JFK.
