Review: The Monk and the Gun (2023) dir. Pawo Choyning Dorji

There’s a great Nike commercial from 1989 with Bo Jackson where other athletes repeat the phrase “Bo knows…” followed by “football,” “baseball,” and so forth, with fragmented clips of him showing off his multi-sport excellence. When the hockey clip rolls, Wayne Gretzky shakes his head and just says “No.” Bo doesn’t know hockey. Jackson very obviously doesn’t know hockey, and ice hockey is so fundamentally different from all of the running-based sports he played that the sign of the lumbering Jackson standing on those ⅛’’ blades is comical. The two just don’t go together.

In a way, this gets at the appeal of The Monk and the Gun, a brand new film that is already among the best-known films to ever come out of the small country of Bhutan. What might a Buddhist monk have to do with a gun? The two contrast in a generative display of symbols. A monk and a gun separately both hold their own symbolic power; together, they create a completely new symbol.

Coming off of the success of 2019’s Academy Award-nominated Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, Bhutanese director Pawo Choyning Dorji finds himself shortlisted again for the Academy’s Best International Feature Film with The Monk and the Gun. His new film is a confident story about navigating modernity in a world that has already moved past modernity. It’s 2006 and the Kingdom of Bhutan is about to become the world’s youngest democracy.

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