Acclaimed Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda’s deep humanism is the engine that drives Monster, a Rashomon-style tale about school bullying that’s told from three related characters’ distinctive points of view. Though assuming the general form of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic, however, Kore-eda’s latest is less an inquiry into truth’s subjectivity (and thus unknowability) than a study of its complexity, as well as a rumination on universal desires to be heard, understood, accepted, and respected. It’s also a portrait of child abuse of both an intentional and accidental variety, and of the lies we tell ourselves and each other—and the grief, fury, and self-recriminations they breed. Winner of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival’s Best Screenplay and Queer Palm awards, it’s one of the director’s finest, its thematic scope and emotional power growing with each new revelation.
A strong rebound from Kore-eda’s underwhelming TV series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, Monster (in theaters Nov. 22 in New York and Dec. 1 in Los Angeles, with additional markets to follow) begins with Saori Mugino (Sakura Ando), a single mother who works at a dry cleaner and cares for her only son Minato (Soya Kurokawa), a quiet fifth-grader. All is apparently well with the duo, or so Saori believes until Minato begins asking strange questions—namely, if a person gets a pig brain transplanted into his head, is he a human or a pig?—and doing unusual things like coming home with only one shoe and randomly cutting his hair.
One night, Minato goes missing, and Saori’s subsequent search leads her to an abandoned railroad-tracks tunnel where she discovers him standing in the dark, repeatedly asking “Who’s the monster?” If this is perplexing, their ride home is even more shocking, since Minato abruptly leaps out of the moving vehicle. Tests indicate that nothing’s medically wrong with him, and it’s not long before he gives his mother an ostensible explanation for this bizarreness.
According to Minato, the cause of his behavior is Michitoshi Hori (Eita Nagayama), his homeroom teacher—an accusation that casts Monster, for the moment, as a drama about ferocious maternal protectiveness. Naturally outraged, Saori has a meeting with principal Fushimi (Yûko Tanaka), who’s just returned to work, still shell-shocked, following a horrific tragedy in which her husband unintentionally ran over their grandchild. Saori covets not just answers about Hori’s abuse but a compassionate response that leads to warranted punishment. Instead, she gets vague and evasive boilerplate admissions, including from Hori, who like principal Fushimi can barely look her in the eye, much less cop to what’s taken place.
Ensuing meetings beget additional detached apologies and elicit even more enraged frustration (“I don't see any life in any of your eyes. Am I talking to human beings?”). Even once Hiro publicly confesses to what he’s allegedly done (and is vilified in the newspaper), doubt remains, thanks to Hiro’s claim that Minato is a bully, and that the target of his wrath is classmate Yori (Hinata Hiiragi)—a notion that becomes plausible once Saori visits Yori at his home.
The reality of people’s lives and actions are a mystery that can only be solved by comprehending everyone’s disparate experiences in Monster, whose title itself proves a question that Kore-eda refuses to explicitly answer. Rather, once Saori finds Minato missing in his bedroom during a dawning typhoon, the director rewinds to replay events from the vantage point of Hiro, whose girlfriend thinks his smile is creepy and whose professional interactions with Minato don’t gibe with the boy’s prior narrative. In fact, Hori comes off as an engaged and caring teacher whose one physical altercation with Minato was inadvertent and instigated by the boy going crazy on his classmates’ possessions in a puzzling tantrum. Consequently, when Hori bristles at going along with his superiors’ demands to kowtow to Saori and accept blame for the infractions he's been accused of committing, his reluctance makes far more sense.
Monster’s middle chapter revisits and recontextualizes that which was depicted and discussed in its opening passage, including a nearby building fire and the rumor that Hori was in the place visiting a brothel. So too does its closing third, which centers on Minato and his relationship with Yori, a quiet gay outcast whose nasty drunken dad is the source of the aforementioned pig-brain query, and who’s routinely picked on by his compatriots—save, that is, for Minato, who befriends him in secret. Their dynamic turns out to be the most surprising element of Kore-eda’s film, providing a kids-eye-view of a story whose many sides are all, to some extent, incomplete. The boys’ budding relationship, and the messy feelings and unwise actions it inspires in Minato, transform the proceedings into a tender snapshot of youthful confusion and yearning, all while reinforcing the material’s primary focus on the different ways in which everyone wants to be seen.
Monster is Kore-eda’s first feature in nearly three decades that he didn’t write himself, and Yuji Sakamoto’s screenplay incisively peers into the crevices of its many characters’ hearts, locating the wellsprings of fear, pain, shame and regret that have conspired to bring about these events. Even so, ambiguities remain with regards to both some plot particulars and its primary players’ motivations. The big picture is within reach and yet never fully visible, and that haunting haziness ultimately comes across as part of the overarching point.
More crucial, however, is the film’s empathy for individuals trying to make heads or tails of a situation, life, and universe that offers no instruction manual nor any omniscient outlooks and conclusions. Set to the lyrical compositions of late, great composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (in his final big-screen project), Monster recognizes that no one can ever know everything but also contends that greater consideration of ourselves and others is vital in order to alleviate children’s (and adults’) physical and emotional suffering—be it from bullying, domestic abuse or unthinkable calamities.
Monster’s desperate hope for tolerance and thoughtfulness crescendos in its closing moments. Affording a cautiously optimistic vision of kids weathering the storm—set to Sakamoto’s heartbreaking piano—Kore-eda’s climax packs a poignant wallop that, like the rest of his film, is all the more affecting for sneaking up on one so stealthily.
