Hal Hartley’s latest feature—a cross, as one French critic put it, "between Beauty and the Beast and King Kong"—sets an ironic eye on the media and its pursuit of sensationalism as it explores the human condition. Canadian ingenue Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter) is cast as a guileless young reporter who is sent to Iceland by her ratings-obsessed boss (the inimitable Helen Mirren) to investigate a murderous, misanthropic monster after a television crew goes missing. Once there, however, she befriends the creature, whose all-too-human suffering can be dispelled only through a death he cannot accomplish himself. Hartley veteran Robert John Burke plays the monster and British veteran Julie Christie a mad-scientist doctor.