Blonde has long been a magnet for rumors and controversy, even before its director, Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik, embarked on shooting more than three years ago. The film carries sky-high expectations that few titles ever meet, and its world premiere at the Mostra festival marks a pivotal moment to gauge how far it can rise above the early hype. What is certain is that Blonde is an extraordinary, monumental achievement—a screening that feels overwhelming in its ambition. It would not be surprising if it earned a place among the festival’s prize contenders; the film’s intensity alone makes it a likely candidate for top honors. Ana de Armas delivers a portrayal of Marilyn Monroe, the iconic Norma Jeane, that lingers with a menacing force and depth.
Yet Blonde also promises to ignite the kind of debate that accompanied Joyce Carol Oates’s novel on which it is based. Both Oates’s book and Dominik’s film are works of fiction fueled by powerful imagination, bending and sometimes reconstructing real life to seek a spiritual and symbolic truth about a polarizing figure. Critics who accused Oates of shaping Monroe through assumptions and untruths may raise similar arguments about the movie, arguing that it exploits the icon even as it seeks to illuminate the person behind the myth.
In this interpretation, the central figure is more than a victim. She is cast as a woman defined by others’ fantasies, repeatedly pushed to the brink by the predatory behavior of men who seek power through her image. But the film also aims to honor a person who has long been denied the respect she deserved. This approach helps explain why the narrative sometimes foregrounds dramatic fabrications in Monroe’s public persona, offering a lens through which to view why these distortions persist. The release notes include a classification as an adults-only feature for the United States. In one sequence, a controversial scene with President John F. Kennedy is depicted in a stark, unsettling way. Other elements hint at the troubling power dynamics in Hollywood history, including accounts of abuse and coercive control that have haunted the industry since the 2010s.
The film traces a life through well-known biographical milestones, beginning with a childhood marked by maternal mental illness and the absence of a father Monroe would never truly know. Blonde unfolds through a compulsive immersion in moments from Monroe’s life and career, including marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, and emblematic films and stages from the 1950s. Rather than rely on a single linear arc, the piece moves with shifting light and texture, blending black-and-white visuals with varying screen resolutions to push the storytelling toward impressionism. Monroe’s image blends into the person behind it, and addiction to prescription medications intensifies as the story progresses. The director has explained that the film traces the arc of Norma Jeane while letting Marilyn gradually take charge of the narrative, a transformation that demanded a grueling but revelatory performance from De Armas. She described the experience as a descent into very dark places, where the emotional connection to the character was found through pain and trauma.
Dominik reshapes the sequence of scenes into a mosaic drawn from Monroe’s iconic photo shoots and famed movie moments. These moments become markers of abuse and objectification that challenge traditional glamour and desire. De Armas reflects that Blonde helped her empathize with performers who endure intense public scrutiny and the pressure to be what others expect them to be, a realization she also used as a shield against invasive attention. The process underscored a crucial lesson about protecting one’s own sense of self under relentless media scrutiny.
At its core, Blonde examines the dissonance between Hollywood’s myth of the sexual goddess—the peroxide glow, the sultry gaze, the fashion-forward wardrobe—and the woman fighting to survive under that myth’s crushing weight. She grapples with a body that bore no children, with battles over sexuality, and with repeated losses. Popular culture has long known this person yet has often turned away for fear of confronting a shared misery. Presenting this journey in a cinematic form will likely intensify the conversation about how such figures are treated by an industry that profits from their legends, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. The film invites audiences to reconsider what it costs to bring a figure like Monroe into view, and how society confronts the pain behind the spectacle, a conversation that will continue well beyond the premiere. press materials and industry interviews.