Blonde invites a reading that goes beyond surface audacity and celebrity myth. The film, as shaped by Andrew Dominik, refuses to bow to simple biographical storytelling or to settle for a mere portrait of Marilyn Monroe as a cleanly legible icon. Instead, it leans into an expressionist pulse, letting light and shadow, rhythm and blur, and a fracturing of time and perspective reveal a spectrum of Monroe that is unsettling in its magnitude. The work treats Norma Jeane not just as a public phenomenon but as a person whose interior world is continually refracted through a harsh outer gaze. The black-and-white palette becomes more than a stylistic choice; it acts like a lens that distorts, sharpens, and reconfigures the familiar image until the boundary between surface charm and inner ruin grows porous. Across frame after frame, the mask of Marilyn is seen inching toward a voracious consumption of the face it wears, as the film moves between different screen formats and varying speeds and degrees of focus. This fluidity mirrors the way the subject’s public identity is consumed by perception itself, and it mirrors the psychological degradation that the narrative anatomizes with unflinching clarity. The director’s method is not merely to admire or replicate Monroe’s iconography, but to scrutinize how that iconography can eclipse the person behind it, turning cultural symbols into shards that can be observed, questioned, and reassembled. The result is a cinematic experience that asks whether the image of a star can ever be disentangled from the forces that define its appeal, or whether those forces inevitably distort the core of who she was. Ana de Armas enters this treacherous territory with precision: she embodies a tension between a radiant surface and a fractured interior, performing with a fidelity that makes the character’s wit, intelligence, and emotional sensitivity feel at once palpable and perilously exposed. Yet the film does not settle for a straightforward homage, and its tonal shifts, its textual play with memory, and its willingness to let darkness seep into otherwise glittering surfaces all contribute to a portrait that unsettles as much as it fascinates. In this sense, Blonde becomes less a conventional biopic than a rigorous inquiry into the mechanics of fame, the price of public desire, and the way a singular image can shape the stories people tell about a life that was never entirely their own. The audience is invited to consider how the public persona and the private person negotiate the same space, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in outright conflict, and to witness how the act of viewing can itself become a form of complicity. By resisting easy conclusions, the film keeps the viewer aware of the constructed nature of celebrity and the ongoing human costs that lie beneath the glittering surface, a reminder that every iconic image carries within it a history of demand, appetite, and consequence that is far more complicated than any single frame can convey.
