Lily Sullivan is about to see her horror profile rise exponentially — she stars in Evil Dead Rise, which releases in April — but today, Gizmodo has the exclusive teaser premiere of another genre film she’ll soon appear in: Monolith, an Australian sci-fi thriller screening in the SXSW Film Festival’s “Midnighters” program.
Directed by Matt Vesely and written by Lucy Campbell, Monolith stars Sullivan as a troubled journalist who enters self-imposed isolation, then becomes convinced she’s stumbled onto the story of a lifetime. Her subsequent solo investigation may or may not involve aliens. Check out the teaser!
The official synopsis for Monolith is as follows: “A bold science fiction thriller featuring one woman, one location, and a mystery uncovered through audio — in which a young journalist discovers a strange artefact and begins to convince herself it is evidence of an alien conspiracy. Recently disgraced and desperate for a story, the Interviewer holes herself up in her parents’ luxurious home and gets to work on the only job she can get — hosting a clickbait investigative podcast. When she receives an anonymous email leading her to a retired housekeeper who claims her life has been destroyed by a strange black brick, the Interviewer embarks on a mystery that leads her down a rabbit hole of truth and lies at the heart of her own story.”
Conspiracies, rabbit holes, strange artifacts, a character getting lost in her own brain, a mystery that unfolds through a patchwork of different voices? Yep, we’re intrigued. Monolith screens March 13, 14, and 18 at SXSW; it has a distributor but does not yet have a release date.