Monster – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Mon­ster – first-look review

18 May 2023

Words by Charles Bramesco

Two children running through a lush, green forest.
Two children running through a lush, green forest.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s lat­est, scored by the late Ryuichi Sakamo­to, is a dense, shape-shift­ing dra­ma that grows more scat­tered as it progresses.

With his nar­ra­tive­ly oblique yet emo­tion­al­ly leg­i­ble new film Mon­ster, one-time Palme d’Or win­ner Hirokazu Kore-eda adds anoth­er entry to his scrap­book of frac­tured fam­i­lies and recon­sti­tut­ed makeshift sub­sti­tutes. A woman sto­ical­ly grieves the child she acci­den­tal­ly killed while back­ing out of the dri­ve­way, a sin claimed by her hus­band for pub­lic appear­ances’ sake; a moth­er and son cel­e­brate a depart­ed dad’s birth­day with a lit­tle cake and some one-sided con­ver­sa­tions with his mem­o­ry; a lone­ly kid finds the love his sin­gle father refus­es to dole out in a blos­som­ing friend­ship with a classmate. 

The cur­rents of iso­la­tion, yearn­ing, and rev­e­la­to­ry com­pas­sion wield the same qui­et poten­tial for dev­as­ta­tion that’s become syn­ony­mous with the rest of Kore-eda’s oeu­vre. But work­ing from some­one else’s script for the first time since his debut — cour­tesy of Japan­ese TV stal­wart Yuji Sakamo­to, a long-want­ed col­lab­o­ra­tor for their shared pet themes — the artic­u­la­tion of these feel­ings has been delib­er­ate­ly gar­bled to uneven results.

The first form assumed by this shape-shift­ing dra­ma holds togeth­er while fore­ground­ing its struc­tur­ing absences, odd inex­plic­a­bil­i­ties to be recon­tex­tu­al­ized by dou­bling back through these scenes lat­er on. School­boy Mina­to (Soya Kurokawa) has been act­ing strange, though his moth­er Saori (Saku­ra Ando) can’t quite tell whether he’s tuck-and-rolling out of a mov­ing car because young­sters do weird things, or if a pig’s brain real­ly has been implant­ed in his skull as he claims. She learns that he got this notion from his teacher Hori (Eita Nagaya­ma), who also seems to be respon­si­ble for the blood­ied ear that lit­tle Mina­to comes home with one afternoon. 

For about an hour, the most engag­ing sec­tion of a film that grows more scat­tered as it pro­gress­es, a bat­tle of wills plays out between a teacher and the stu­dent that may or may not be try­ing to frame him for can­ce­lable offens­es. Saori’s one-woman war on the school she sees as har­bor­ing an abuser leads to some light satire on Japan­ese work­place culture’s polite­ness-to-a-fault, the fin­er points of which may be lost on my fel­low gai­jin as they were on me.

The sec­ond act piv­ots both to ten­der­ness and dis­joint­ed­ness as Mina­to befriends new class­mate Eri (Hina­ta Hiira­gi), their bond solid­i­fy­ing as they make a club­house out of a rust­ed-out school bus hid­ing in an idyl­lic patch of woods. Kore-eda draws out the dark­ness sur­round­ing this frag­ile friend­ship, tact­ful­ly point­ing to the caus­es that com­pel them to fore­stall going back to their respec­tive homes as long as pos­si­ble. But he still leaves glar­ing ques­tion marks — chief among them the iden­ti­ty of the mon­ster” sug­gest­ed by the title — just so they can be tied up in the final segment’s over­ly pre­scrip­tive refram­ing of perspective.

Every­thing clicks into place as the audi­ence more clear­ly hears a mum­bled line of dia­logue the sec­ond time around, or sees through the the sheets of rain in an ear­li­er typhoon mud­slide. But the sen­ti­men­tal wal­lop of Kore-eda’s tech­nique takes a back seat to this writer­ly game-play­ing, more pre­oc­cu­pied with the slid­ing pieces of sto­ry than the cathars­es they’re meant to trigger. 

A rag­ing infer­no book­ends the film, the cul­prit and their moti­va­tions two main sub­jects of inter­est for the screenplay’s over­lap­ping struc­ture. The even­tu­al reveal of the who and the why pro­vides a sat­is­fy­ing sense of res­o­lu­tion, though this reward feels a bit pet­ty in com­par­i­son to this film’s ample free­stand­ing plea­sures: the tremu­lous dis­cov­ery of love, the crys­talline peace of after­school hours spent at unsu­per­vised play, and above all else, the trans­portive score from the late, incom­pa­ra­ble Ryuichi Sakamo­to, a mas­ter­work with­in a minor work.

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