Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The first must-see film of the year.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Imagine something that should not be? Imagine that it is and we made it so because we needed to believe in monsters to make us more human? This isn't a movie about good and evil or death or ugliness. It's about the beauty that we possess because we consign the ugly nature to something that we can point to and say "that is not us", to make us justified that we are not it.If you see one movie, see this one. It's subtle. Watch it more than once. Watch it a few times and leave your disbelief at the door. Every actor who isn't a caricature of whom they need to be is simply just heartbreaking. The acting is comic while being better than you could ever imagine. The lines, while cartoonish in some cases, resonate and make the story.The monster is us and we are not him. That's why this movie is so good.

"No monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze." - Gilbert Chesterton Hal Hartly directs "No Such Thing". Poorly executed, the film nevertheless has a VERY interesting screenplay. It stars Sarah Polley as Beatrice, an overly innocent/pure journalist trapped in a fairy tale world teeming with vulgar, opportunistic, horrible schemers. Everyone's a terrible person, except little Beatrice, who upon learning that her fiancé has disappeared in Iceland, goes searching for him.En route to Iceland - a country chosen because of its rich mythology - Beatrice's plane crashes (or, indeed, it may be that it is her fiancé's plane which has crashed). From this point onwards the film becomes a sort of hallucination, a dreamy fantasy informed by Beatrice's own subconscious. And so tied down to a hospital bed, Beatrice spins the tale of a monster living in Iceland who "destroys humans" and who has "destroyed her fiancé". Hartly's intention here, of course, is to highlight how there is "no such thing as monsters", that we "create monsters" out of our own anxieties, preconceptions, prejudices etc. In Beatrice's case, she creates the monster as a personification of all the world's injustices.But the script gets more interesting. Whilst the monster has been created by outsiders as a means of explaining a kind of all-encompassing "cosmic" persecution, the monster itself is relentlessly persecuted. Later in the film the monster is destroyed because it "can't withstand information" and "exists between the cracks of reality and perception". Monsters – and the term "monster" here applies to any "Other" (the film was released in 2001, when America's Monster swiftly became vague, bearded Middle Easterners) – therefore evaporate once their generators learn enough to understand "them", empathise with "them", or learn "their" history.What's weird is that the monster also exists outside of Beatrice's fantasy segment. The film opens with a coda in which the Monster records a tape in which it complains about God, the universe and what it perceives to be the inherent meaninglessness/cruelty of life and men. The rest of film looks at sleazy media types, traitorous villagers and scuzzy human beings, all selfish, backstabbing and exploitative. This horrible portrayal of the world is a result, via projection, of the Monster's own persecution; it's as much his fantasy as he is Beatrice's. Like a feedback loop, what the film suggests is that Beatrice is as much an idealized image as the monster is – she's the monster's projection, an angel, the promise of bliss – and that the vulgar chaos of society/media/news/art etc create "monsters" as much as they themselves become "monsters" as a response to this chaotic "outside". The film ends with Beatrice looking at us. She's the last thing the monster sees, we're the last thing she sees, the audience positioned as beasts.7.5/10 – Worth one viewing.

Tries to update the Beauty and the Beast fable but gets lost in student-level preachiness about how shallow the world is. Polley is always good company but she's let down by bland cinematography (people have a habit of walking into frame looking at something we can't see) and patchy script.MINOR SPOILERS!!! Why exactly does Polley's character have to spend six months in hospital before the real story begins? Why does she kiss a man on the cheek after he helped drug her and send her off as a human sacrifice for the monster? Why does she suddenly turn into a slut back in the city? If the idea was to show the corruption of fame then it was rushed and didn't suit the character at all.END SPOILERS It tries too hard to say too many things and ends up saying nothing, drifting in and out of rambling passages about the trials of human existence. Not the worst film ever, but for god's sake write for an audience, not just yourself Mr Director.

This was probably the second worst movie I've ever seen - topped only by "Critical Mass". I actually enjoy independent films a lot but this one is just a very bad attempt at producing something artistic. The story is completely pathetic and does not make any sense - there are approximately one hundred mistakes or inconsistencies in it. They cannot seem to decide whether to make it a comedy or a dark drama. In addition, every single actor in "No Such Thing" could easily be nominated for a "worst actor" Emmy. However, the inferiority of the acting and the movie's senselessness is almost funny. This is actually all I have to say about this movie but Internet Movie Data Base requires me to write at least ten lines. So I do not want to conceal that the monster's costume was pretty poor too, making it look like a green faced human with horns. It is supposed to be a billion year old creature who has witnessed the dawn of creation, one could expect to behave quite wise. Instead, it is acting like my wife's little teenage brother. The woman first comes across very cool and mature, just to turn into some goofy girl later for no apparent reason. She may have been badly influenced by the monster's demeanor.