When Anne Hathaway finds herself facing prehistoric dinosaurs in The End of Oak Street, it won’t be the first time the actress has grappled with huge, dangerous reptilians. In a totally different movie, released nearly 10 years ago, an enormous kaiju begins attacking Seoul, and Hathaway’s character gradually realizes that she's somehow controlling it.

Colossal (2016) is an enigma in many ways. The trailer for the Neon film earnestly sells it as a silly rom-com about a down-on-her-luck woman who returns to her hometown to dig her way out of rock bottom. For a while, Colossal is exactly that: a bizarre dark comedy about a woman accidentally becoming a monster.

Hathaway plays Gloria, an unemployed writer struggling with a drinking problem. After her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens) throws her out of his New York apartment, she has no choice but to return to her mostly empty childhood home. She reconnects with an old friend named Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) and spends her nights drinking at his bar. Then, while Gloria stumbles home one morning, a kaiju materializes halfway around the world and begins mimicking Gloria’s every movement.

Colossal evolves into much more than its admittedly great gimmick. What initially resembles a fish-out-of-water kaiju comedy gradually becomes a strange, sometimes frustrating meditation on unfulfilled potential, childhood resentment, and the particular danger posed by a self-proclaimed nice guy who believes his kindness entitles him to a woman.

With Hathaway now confronting dinosaurs in The End of Oak Street, there’s no better time to revisit the monster movie that gave her something much more dangerous to fight: toxic masculinity.

Written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, Colossal initially feels like a casual mumblecore romance with a goofy premise. Gloria notices that the creature appears in Seoul at the same time each morning. Eventually, she works out that it materializes whenever she enters a particular playground at exactly 8:05 a.m. Whatever Gloria does there, the kaiju does in South Korea, including scratching the weird nervous itch she frequently gets atop her head.

Her first experiment is one of drunken wonder. She dances. The monster dances. She makes weird gestures for Oscar and his friends as news footage of the creature spreads across the internet. It’s all so absurd, but it makes Gloria — unemployed, homeless, and perpetually caught in between buzzed and hungover — the most important person alive for a fleeting moment.

Then she stumbles, sending the kaiju crashing to the ground, killing dozens or hundreds of innocent people in the process. The monster becomes a metaphor for how she’s been living her life: letting drunken behavior harm the people around her. Usually it’s hurting one person’s feelings, yet the sheer scale of her carelessness changes her perspective. This sets her on the slow path toward accepting responsibility for her actions.

Gloria’s alcoholism is a focus in Colossal, but her drinking feels like a direct response to her own lack of fulfillment. She once imagined becoming a successful writer in New York. Instead, she lost her job, her relationship, and any sense that her life is moving forward. She responds to that disappointment with sadness and self-destruction. She turns that negative energy inward.

Oscar feels similarly about himself. His most notable achievement is running a bar that he inherited from his father. Instead of sadness, his disappointment has curdled into anger. The way Colossal explores the dichotomy between these two isn’t particularly satisfying, but it sure is compelling. A decade after Colossal’s debut, Sudeikis's performance as Oscar is even more interesting in the post-Ted Lasso era. His’ smiling face has become synonymous with the pinnacle of male goodness.

It’s easy to see that goodness in Oscar even without a mustache. The charm and familiarity are there, but lurking underneath the surface is that kind of sinister “Nice Guy” who believes a single act of kindness entitles him to something he does not actually deserve. That makes it genuinely scary when Oscar’s generosity is exposed as transactional. Oscar gives Gloria a job. He helps furnish her house. He listens to her problems. Somewhere along the way, he decides those favors meant she owed him something. The way Colossal leverages its core gimmick to dramatize this conflict eventually delivers some big surprises.

All these years later, Colossal remains a messy and occasionally frustrating movie. The shift from offbeat kaiju comedy to what’s ostensibly an abuse thriller is downright unpleasant, and it feels abrupt. But Colossal also understands that recognizing your own destructive behavior does not cure it. Taking responsibility is awkward, painful, and far less satisfying than simply defeating a monster.

Like Gloria herself, Colossal is at times difficult to like. Beneath the unwieldy gimmick, however, is a surprisingly incisive understanding of what separates someone who causes harm from someone truly monstrous: the willingness to recognize the damage, take responsibility for it, and finally do something to change.

Colossal is available to stream for free on Kanopy and available to rent or buy across various other platforms.