An intimate study of a pre-teen in turmoil
MONSTER (12A) ★★★★★
Dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda, 127 mins, starring: Sakura Ando, Soya Kurokawa, Eita Nagayama, Hinata Hiiragi
This complex coming-of-age story begins with a huge fire lighting up the sky in an unnamed town in rural Japan. As fire trucks rush to the scene, single mother Saori (Sakura Ando) and her 11-yearold son Minato (Soya Kurokawa) stare from their high-rise balcony. “Don’t fall,” says Saori, grabbing her son with mock alarm and inserting a sense of dread into the humdrum of regular life.
There is a touch of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon to this film, as we see the unfolding disaster from three different perspectives. Over the next few days Saori will see her precious only child unexpectedly cut his hair, come home with a bandage on his ear, jump out of a moving car and eventually accuse his teacher Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama) of bullying him. Furious, Saori marches into school and demands meetings with the headmistress, but is met with excessive formality and no real attempt to get to the bottom of things.
Monster – directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or in 2018 for Shoplifters – deservedly won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival last year.
With such heavy topics as bullying, abuse and homophobia, it could so easily have been a dense drama but throughout it retains a sense of lightness that keeps it immensely watchable and even joyful. Even as the stakes rise – who is the real monster, and how far will they go? – it is often very funny.
Ando is a terrific actress who injects the first act with tremendous wit despite her character living every parent’s worst nightmare as her pre-teen disappears into a vacuum of secrets.
The second act is from Mr Hori’s perspective, the third from Minato’s, and with each comes a new understanding, if never a complete truth. Other characters start to loom large, too, in particular, the creative and unfathomably cheerful classmate Eri (Hinata Hiiragi), whom Mr Hori accuses Minato of bullying. But is he?
The real monster, it seems, is everyone and no one. There is never a big reveal, just incremental shifts and tiny snippets of new information that force us to keep reassessing.
Kore-eda, with a style that remains as understated yet deeply affecting as it was in Shoplifters, is so good at hanging these shifts in perspective off small narrative hooks that you barely notice until the next act comes: a throwaway line about noodles for lunch, the strange blaring of trumpets.
This is an incredibly moving examination of how far gossip can pull us away from the truth, and also of the power of empathy. I’m not sure I’ve seen a better exploration of the need for connection in a world increasingly distorted by social media.