Even monsters need love

Monster ,Berlin International Film Festival

In Monster, Charlize Theron is always looking in the mirror, adjusting her hair: not a bad looker, she reckons, in spite of everything. Yet the face staring back at her belongs to a once handsome woman battered down by life.

The South African-born model and ballerina, regularly voted one of the most glamorous stars in the firmament, acquired two stone, a set of large yellow teeth and cosmetically mottled skin to play Aileen Wuornos, the prostitute convicted of murdering seven men between 1989 and 1990.

There is no dancer's grace in her heavy, swaggering gait; the very way she holds and smokes her cigarettes is a statement of defiance. It's a stupendous feat of physical transformation, which won Theron a Golden Globe last month and now makes her a frontrunner for an Oscar.

But Monster, which received its international premiere in Berlin yesterday and opens in Britain on 2 April, is not a film from which you come out humming the prosthetics. Wuornos's true story was powerful enough for the documentary director Nick Broomfield to make two films about her, and Monster, in its different way, is equally compelling.

Based on letters to a friend during the prisoner's 12 years on death row, it focuses on the brief roller-coaster ride between the time when Wuornos - who was not a lesbian - began an affair with a young woman (Christina Ricci) and the killing spree that led to her arrest.

The first-time writer-director Patty Jenkins shows in swift, sharp strokes how southern Florida's bleak sprawl of biker bars, low-rent hotels and shadowy, windswept freeways eroded Wuornos's humanity. And of how, as she throws a protective arm around Ricci's character and proudly refers to her as "my girl", even a monster needs and deserves a last shot at love.