Monarch

A young man has a super-power: he can block electrical circuits. But his own power risks to overpower him, as everyone else secretly protects him.

Director: Dan Radu Mihai

Monarh / Monarcha

synopsis

Bogdan (35) has lived his entire life believing he has a heart condition. Every day he takes his pills and stays calm. When his girlfriend suddenly disappears, Bogdan is pulled into a journey back to his childhood town, where he finds his best friend under house arrest, trapped in a VR rehabilitation program. Strange characters met along the way draw him closer to home and to his reality, as he learns the pills he was taking to keep calm were fake, and something buried for years emerges to the surface — his strong emotions cause electrical circuits around him to shut down. After each episode, he falls into a deep sleep lasting dozens of hours. Flickering lights and broken circuits mark his path. At the end of the road, the question is no longer what Bogdan can do — but what he is.

DIRECTOR’S VISION

Bogdan is not a hero. He’s a lens — a 35-year-old supermarket announcer who discovers his lifelong heart condition is fake, the pills placebos, and that his strong emotions shut down electrical circuits. After each episode, he falls into a deep sleep. Through him we see what the world has become.

His journey home takes him through quiet absurdity — a truck driver with a daughter whose skin turns purple in sunlight, a priest-pilot dropping vaccines for forest animals, a woman in white who knows more about Bogdan than he does. Everyone he meets is a collapsed world pretending to function. When his power kicks in, everything pauses. He’s the question mark.

Back home, his best friend is under house arrest, trapped in a VR rehabilitation program where robots reenact workers’ stories before being destroyed — a system hacked by rebels calling themselves Les Enfants de Bernanos. The border between real and fantastic dissolves through small disturbances, not spectacle.

In the final act, each character faces their true identity. When Bogdan’s turn comes, the system fails. The screen can’t read him.

Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of kilometers to a place their ancestors came from — but they’ve never been there. Something in them just knows where home is. Bogdan does the same. He returns to the source of his identity without knowing where he’s going.

“I grew up in a country where almost everyone was watched, but no one was seen. The people who protected you were the same ones who lied to you. You stayed calm, you took your pills, and you never asked what was inside them. That world didn’t disappear. It just moved into our phones, our feeds, our VR headsets. We traded one surveillance for another and called it connection. Monarch lives in the gap between those two worlds — the one we remember and the one we pretend to understand.”

Dan Radu Mihai