Monster: Koreeda Hirokazu’s elegant and imaginative expression of childhood

An incident of classroom misconduct – and its ramifications, both domestic and institutional – plays out from three different vantage points in Monster. ‘Perspectives’ wouldn’t quite be the right term: though each section of Koreeda Hirokazu’s elegantly folded new film leads with a different character, the action is never shown explicitly through anyone’s eyes. Reverse angles and newly adjacent, contextualising scenes shift our conception of blame and victimhood in a story that narrows from one of a hostile community to intimate, ecstatic isolation. 

Rashomon (1950) has been raised repeatedly by critics as a reference point since Monster premiered at Cannes last year, but it’s hardly the same. Koreeda’s film doesn’t pit contradicting stories against each other; rather, it layers accounts fraught with blind spots and psychological frailties – building a bigger picture while stressing everyone’s essential unknowability. At Cannes, Monster won the Queer Palme for the best LGBTQ+ story; it’s indicative of the film’s lithe, shimmying structure that viewers may spend the bulk of its running time mystified as to why. 

For Koreeda, the film marks both a homecoming – to Japanese cinema, after somewhat ungainly excursions to France (The Truth, 2019) and South Korea (Broker, 2022) – and a departure. It’s his first feature since his 1995 debut Maborosi that he hasn’t written, and while Sakamoto Yūji’s elaborately diagrammatic screenplay plays to Koreeda’s strengths with its fine-grained family drama and empathetic focus on children, its narrative switches and reversals require more opacity and emotional reticence than is customary from his filmmaking.

It begins with a building ablaze on the squat skyline of a small, unspecified Japanese city; a freak rainstorm will bookend proceedings, the elements twice uncannily intervening in a story of human impulse and foible. On one floor of the burning block is a hostess bar supposedly frequented by mild-mannered primary school teacher Mr Hori (Nagayama Eita); some distance away, widowed single mother Saori (Andō Sakura, the marvellous star of Koreeda’s 2018 film Shoplifters) watches the inferno with morbid interest from her apartment balcony. Her pre-teen son Minato (Kurokawa Soya) is one of Hori’s students; his mother’s distaste for Hori’s rumoured extracurricular activities will soon factor into a tense bust-up with the school staff.

The hitherto gentle Minato has become sullen and unreadable – cutting his own hair, going awol in a storm drain, jumping from his mother’s moving car. When he comes home from school with a facial injury, saying Hori is responsible, Saori reads the teacher and oddly impassive headmistress Fushimi (Tanaka Yūko) the riot act. She gets repeated deferential apologies, but no explanation; the script is sharp on how a culture of courtesy can impede candour. 

After 45 minutes, we rewind to the beginning, with Hori’s knowledge of classroom dynamics recalibrating our perception of Minato’s behaviour. But the teacher’s outburst that Minato is a bully – and his smaller, feyer classmate Yori (Hiiragi Hinata) his target – doesn’t ring true either: the boys are friends, perhaps chastely more, with an understanding of each other that increasingly excludes their minders.

‘Who is the monster?’ is a recurring question in Koreeda’s film, vocalised by the boys in a taunting, sing-song chant, but essentially paraphrased by adult characters keen to divide the world into villains and victims. Fushimi’s strange, affectless manner stems from the recent death of her grandchild, in which she may have been culpable; Yori’s alcoholic single father (Nakamura Shidō) may be his real abuser, implanting a ludicrous lie in the boy’s mind – that his brain was transplanted with a pig’s – which ripples maliciously through the action.

Some may find this a lot of business to wade through to get to the film’s heart, crystallised in its final third: a naive, intensely pure romance of sorts between two grieving boys, exquisitely played by Hiiragi and Kurokawa. But the friction between adults’ rule-determined antagonism and the unbound emotional and imaginative expression of childhood is essential to the film’s payoff – ineffable tragedy rising into galloping, sunlit release.

 ► Monster is in UK cinemas from 15 March.