Monster review – heartfelt and likably earnest | Little White Lies

Mon­ster review – heart­felt and lik­ably earnest

12 Mar 2024 / Released: 15 Mar 2024

Two children running through a lush, green forest.
Two children running through a lush, green forest.
3

Anticipation.

One of Japan’s greatest living filmmakers with his annual delivery.

3

Enjoyment.

Some wonderful stuff here, but too many contrived writerly tics to allow it to really soar.

3

In Retrospect.

Not Kore-eda’s most cohesive film, but still a heartfelt and likably earnest one.

The rela­tion­ship between two young school­boys has ram­i­fi­ca­tions for their local com­mu­ni­ty in the new dra­ma from Hirokazu Koreeda.

With his nar­ra­tive­ly oblique yet emo­tion­al­ly leg­i­ble new film, Hirokazu Kore-eda adds anoth­er entry to his scrap­book of frac­tured fam­i­lies and recon­sti­tut­ed makeshift sub­sti­tutes. A woman grieves the child she acci­den­tal­ly killed, a sin claimed by her hus­band for pub­lic appear­ances’ sake; a moth­er and son cel­e­brate a depart­ed dad’s birth­day with cake and 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. These cur­rents of iso­la­tion, yearn­ing and com­pas­sion wield the same qui­et poten­tial for dev­as­ta­tion that’s syn­ony­mous with Kore-eda’s oeu­vre. But work­ing with some­one else’s script for the first time since his debut — Japan­ese TV stal­wart Yuji Sakamo­to — the artic­u­la­tion of these feel­ings has pro­duced 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 lat­er on. School­boy Mina­to (Soya Kurokawa) has been act­ing strange. His moth­er Saori (Saku­ra Ando) can’t tell whether he’s tuck-and-rolling out of a mov­ing car because young­sters do weird things, or if a pig’s brain has been implant­ed in his skull as he claims. She learns that he got this notion from his teacher Hori (Eita Nagaya­ma), who seems to be respon­si­ble for the blood­ied ear that Mina­to comes home with one afternoon.

In 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 can­cellable offences. Saori’s war on the school she sees as har­bour­ing an abuser leads to light satire on Japan­ese work­place culture’s polite­ness-to-a-fault, the fin­er points of which may be lost on my fel­low gai­jin.

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. 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. He still leaves glar­ing ques­tion marks – chief among them the iden­ti­ty of the tit­u­lar mon­ster” – just so they can be tied up in the final segment’s refram­ing of perspective.

Every­thing clicks into place as the audi­ence clear­ly hears a mum­bled line of dia­logue the sec­ond time around, or sees through sheets of rain in an ear­li­er typhoon mud­slide. 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 should trigger.

The even­tu­al reveal of the who and the why pro­vides sat­is­fy­ing res­o­lu­tion, though the reward feels pet­ty in com­par­i­son to the film’s free­stand­ing plea­sures: the tremu­lous dis­cov­ery of love, the crys­talline peace of unsu­per­vised play, and above all else, the trans­portive score from the late Ryuichi Sakamo­to, a mas­ter­work with­in a minor work.

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