Compare the first act dialogue—full of hopeful “maybe” and “I wish”—to the third act, where Aileen’s speech becomes a tangle of justification and nihilism. In the infamous scene where she confronts Selby after her final murder, the script does not allow for a melodramatic confession. Instead, Aileen screams: “You don’t know what it’s like to be hated your whole life.” It is a child’s argument, a plea for understanding that comes out as rage.
Furthermore, Jenkins uses the men’s dialogue to indict the system. The johns in the script are not cartoon villains; they are banal monsters. They speak in transactional pleasantries—“You got a place?” “How much?”—that mask a predatory entitlement. When Aileen kills the Good Samaritan who tries to help her (the character based on victim Richard Mallory), the script emphasizes his initial kindness, only to reveal the violent intent underneath. Jenkins argues that the true horror of the world is not the monster it creates, but the routine, low-grade sadism of ordinary men that goes unpunished. While this is an essay about the script, it is impossible to ignore how Jenkins’ writing is fundamentally built around the concept of the body—specifically, the abject female body. The screenplay constantly directs attention to Aileen’s physicality as a site of social failure. She is described as having sunken eyes, bad skin, and a “manly” walk. Jenkins writes scenes of Aileen looking in the mirror, not with vanity, but with alienated confusion. The script’s stage directions often read like psychological short stories: “Aileen stares at her reflection. She doesn’t see a woman. She sees a target.” monster 2003 script
The script introduces Aileen (Charlize Theron) not as a predator, but as a desperate, broken woman on the verge of suicide. The opening lines of dialogue are Aileen, drunk and aimless, telling a biker in a bar that she was a “good girl” who lost her way. The inciting incident is not her first murder, but her meeting with Selby Wall (Christina Ricci), a lonely, naive young woman exiled by her homophobic parents. Jenkins scripts their courtship with aching sincerity: the cheap motel room, the nervous laughter, the first kiss. For forty-five pages, the audience is lulled into believing they are watching a queer indie romance about two lost souls finding refuge in one another. Compare the first act dialogue—full of hopeful “maybe”
This structural choice is cruel but brilliant. By the time Aileen commits her first murder—killing a sadistic john who beats and rapes her—the script has already conditioned us to root for her survival. The violence is reactive, self-defense. Jenkins writes the scene with visceral chaos: Aileen’s terror, the struggle, the gun going off accidentally. The script doesn’t celebrate the act; it mourns it. By grounding the horror in the love story, Jenkins ensures that every subsequent murder feels less like a spree and more like a desperate, doomed attempt to preserve a fragile domestic fantasy. The tragedy is not that Aileen kills; it is that she kills for love , and that love is inherently unsustainable in a world that has already condemned her. Jenkins’ script is notable for its raw, naturalistic dialogue that often borders on the inarticulate. Aileen is not a silver-tongued anti-hero; she speaks in the fragmented, defensive patois of the traumatized. Lines like “I’ll take respect over love any day” or “The world doesn’t forgive” are delivered not as epigrams but as tired, weary truths. The script excels at showing how Aileen’s language hardens over time. Furthermore, Jenkins uses the men’s dialogue to indict
