A ferocious tour de force

When Charlize Theron won the Best Actress Oscar for Monster last month, there was much knee-jerk critical sniping.

Many commentators were quick to write off her victory as Hollywood rewarding yet another beautiful women for making herself ugly. But there is so, so much more to Theron's performance than just her - albeit convincing - appearance. It's a depiction that lingers with you, wondrously and tortuously.

The story of Aileen Wuornos, who was executed in 2002, is infamous. A drifter prostitute in Florida, she killed seven johns before being caught, villified as America's first female serial killer.

As Aileen, Charlize swaggers around, a feisty, jittery figure, her arms flailing, her mouth permanently jutting and turned down on her sunburnt, shiny face. The picture quality is dirty and scrubby, a filmy mirror holding up the grubby reflection of her life.

Aileen meets the cherubic-looking Selby (a strangely unconvincing turn from Christina Ricci), a young lesbian who naively seduces her. Initially resisting her approaches ("I ain't no f***ing dyke"), Aileen begins to fall for this romantic figure.

Then the tone of the film takes a horrifically darker turn. A john turns violent on Aileen, smashing her head, tying her up, raping her. To escape death, she grabs the man's gun and shoots him dead.

As she commits more and more crime, Aileen begins to take on a crazed glaze of confidence. Trickling through our consciousness throughout the course of this film is the end we know is coming.

Monster is tough-going: you know that Aileen Wuornos was cursed from the word go, and that she never had a chance at a fulfilling, 'normal' life. You know all this, and yet you are deeply affected by this unpretentious, incredibly moving film, which shakes and rumbles with a ferocious kinetic force.