In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the 20-year-anniversary sequel to 2006’s hit fashion-world comedy, once-hapless protagonist Andy (Anne Hathaway) mentions that she’s spent much of the time since the first movie away from New York City, traveling the world as a journalist on assignment, “chasing stories.” That’s an unusually cheerful starting place for a legacy sequel, a form that often demands beloved characters start out unfulfilled or disappointed with their lives.
Though the sequel is up front about the dire state of the media industry, it’s clear that Andy has been relatively lucky during these intervening years. It’s easy to imagine a different fate for her — a version of Andy who might look something like Gloria, Anne Hathaway’s character from 2017’s science fiction film Colossal. Released at the approximate midpoint between the two Devil Wears Prada films, Colossal remains one of Hathaway’s best (she thinks so, too!), in part because of how unflinching it is in telling a story of human weakness in a world that also features towering kaiju.
Like Andy from The Devil Wears Prada, Gloria is a writer who starts out in New York, though it doesn’t seem like she’s ever had a job as glamour-adjacent as Andy’s early gig at Runway. Tellingly, the audience quickly learns more about Gloria’s all-night drinking habits than her job writing articles for an online magazine. Colossal opens with Gloria being ejected from the apartment she shares with about-to-be-ex-boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens), who is fed up with her drinking and unemployment, and urges her to seek help. (Eventually, we’re prompted to wonder whether he’s more bothered by her self-destructive alcoholism or her lack of income.)
Gloria is next seen performing a sort of compromise between seeking help and doing nothing: She temporarily returns to her small New England hometown. She has no particular support system there — her parents have moved away, leaving her an unoccupied, unfurnished house to stay in. But she’s far away from her usual drinking buddies, too.
That changes when Gloria reconnects with her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who owns a local bar where he hangs out after hours with a couple of townie pals. In the first of several displays of unsolicited attempted charity, Oscar offers Gloria a part-time bartending job. He could use the extra hand, because his bar has become a gathering place for people to watch a strange and unsettling piece of international news play out in the comfort of company: A giant monster has appeared in South Korea, clumsily attacking the city of Seoul.
In short order, Gloria realizes from looking at the footage that the monster is… her. Not literally her, but not purely metaphorically, either. When she steps onto a small playground at a certain time of day, her giant-monster avatar materializes in Seoul, and does whatever she does. For the monster’s first few appearances, this means he is mainly stumbling around drunk, because Gloria usually is too.
Colossal is partially about the vicious cycle of alcoholism, but it’s also one of cinema’s more stinging recent indictments of toxic masculinity. That description might make the movie sound clumsy, even cheesily opportunistic, but Gloria and Oscar are such precise, well-drawn characters that it never feels like writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is trying to score points by delivering the right kind of lecture. Gloria and Oscar have a particularly grim kinship because they’re both ultimately fueled by self-loathing. Though their respective feelings have distinct origins, those origins are also entwined. Gloria and Oscar’s shared childhood gives their conflict a mythic dimension, which Vigalondo then blows up further, to kaiju size. The movie echoes the narrative of countless Godzilla movies: Gloria’s monster initially hurts and terrifies the people of Seoul, then becomes their unexpected champion when another mega-sized threat emerges.
Hathaway is terrific here, with her big eyes often betraying the diminished mirth of her benders. Slowly, Gloria starts to separate her many personal failings from the diagnoses various men have laid on her. Like the Devil Wears Prada movies, Colossal underlines that as much as Hathaway reads like a rom-com queen, she doesn’t often star in traditional romances. A first-time Colossal viewer might reasonably expect her to spark with Sudeikis, who can be enormously charming, as in Sleeping with Other People, one of the best romantic comedies of the century so far. Instead, what happens between them is genuinely prickly; on a second viewing, it’s even easier to see the resentments and aggressions simmering just beneath the surface of Sudeikis’ performance.
Vigalondo stumbles a little in his ultimate explanation of the kaiju phenomenon; it’s easy enough to accept the magical-realism mechanics, but they do involve what seems like random memory suppression to better conceal Gloria and Oscar’s shared backstory. Mostly, though, it’s thrilling to see giant monsters (depicted through limited but entirely effective CG effects) used in such unusual, observant circumstances, in all of their sometimes dangerous, often unwieldy, occasionally triumphant glory.
The social ills that kaiju sometimes symbolize in older movies become, in the process, more personal, though still applicable to society at large. The Devil Wears Prada movies are among Hathaway’s signature hits, but Colossal deserves to stand alongside Rachel Getting Married as proof that she can go deeper and darker without sacrificing her open-hearted relatability.
Colossal is currently streaming on Netflix.
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