Monster
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s childhood drama tackles fresh subject matter but in an unnecessarily cumbersome way.
There is no doubt about the right of the prolific Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda to be considered one of his country’s major filmmakers but I think that I am not entirely alone in taking the view that his more recent work has been far from his best. He has been making feature films for almost thirty years and, indeed, the first film of his that I saw was one of his finest, After Life made in 1998. It was a deeply philosophical and off-beat work quite unlike anything else that he would go on to do but his fourth feature Nobody Knows made in 2004, a story of children having to cope on their own, now looks more characteristic of what was to come and it brought to mind the neo-realist films of the 1940s made by such as De Sica. However, it was Still Walking made four years later that truly widened Kore-eda’s international standing and that was seen by many as a family story reminiscent of the films of his compatriot Ozu. That comparison continued to be made at least up to the time of Our Little Sister (2015) but Kore-eda started to find this irksome. Nevertheless, the theme of family life continued to feature in his work even if the term "family" was widened to incorporate less traditional groups of people functioning together less formally. At the same time breakaway elements became part of his work as illustrated by 2017’s pretentious drama The Third Murder while The Truth (2019) was made in France and Broker (2022) in South Korea. Both of these films set abroad received somewhat mixed reviews but with Monster, which finds him back in Japan, some critics have found a return to form regardless of the fact that on this occasion Kore-eda, who almost always writes his own screenplays, has turned instead to one written by Yûji Sakamoto. My own view, however, is that Monster only adds to the sense that for the past decade Kore-eda has been a talent in decline.
Although the fact goes unannounced on screen, Monster proves to be a film in three parts each built around the same situation, one that occurs in a primary school where Minato (Soya Kurokawa) is a pupil. This makes it a film which takes up in turn three distinctive viewpoints and in consequence many critics have compared it to Rashomon, that classic Kurosawa film of 1950. However, it is easy to see why Kore-eda himself sees this film as being based on a different concept since Rashomon was notable for a single event being described in totally different and inconsistent ways by the people involved in it. Here too there is a shift in each section because the focus varies but the viewer’s understanding is widened as the viewpoint changes and the three segments are not directly and challengingly at odds with each other. The nearest comparison that I can think of comes not from cinema but from television in the form of the justly celebrated quartet written by John Hopkins in the 1960s which went under the single title Talking to a Stranger.
While it is possible to indicate the basic situation in Monster and who the characters are, the critic is in a difficult position here because one’s view of the film is so strongly affected by what happens in the last of its three parts. To disclose what causes that when it is not foreshadowed in the film itself would be in breach of the important rule that plot developments should not be revealed in a review. There's no problem though in revealing that the character central at the start is Minato's mother, a widow named Saori (Sakura Andô) who believes that her son’s disturbing behaviour is down to him being bullied in school. Saori makes a big issue of it and confronts the school principal, Fushimi (Yûko Tanaka), who is defensive and unyielding. It's a situation which more often than not would be portrayed in a way that invited obvious sympathy for the mother and son thus making one deplore the boy’s teacher, Hori (Eita Nagayama) who, according to young Minato, had hit him. However, the initial tone of the film is rather oddly more quizzical than one would expect and then its second part, introduced by shots of a fire which had already started the film’s first section, goes back to portray events from Hori’s viewpoint introducing us to this young teacher’s girlfriend (Mitsuki Takahata). It does so in a way that switches our sympathies to Hori even as it replays some of the scenes seen earlier. But nothing prepares us for what the third section shows us.
Compare Monster with the outstanding German picture The Teachers’ Lounge which was an Oscar contender this year and one is immediately aware of how more sure-footed that film is than this one although that is largely down to Yûji Sakamoto’s screenplay rather than to Kore-eda. Where The Teachers’ Lounge feels absolutely real and gains from its sustained naturalism, Monster often seems self-conscious in more ways than one. There is, for example, a repeated stress on the question of whether a human being with a pig’s head is human or animal and the way in which this is used as a symbol of deviation feels set up. There is certainly a natural place here for examples of the school covering things up but, if deciding not to acknowledge publicly bad behaviour by a boy in class is a reasonable example of that, it comes across as pushing things when the headmistress seeks to encourage her husband to take the blame for a fatal accident caused by her. But the air of contrivance is arguably stronger than ever when both of the first two sections lead to a dramatic moment that breaks off so that the film will have to come back to it later to cover what happened next.
The worst sin, however, is the absence of any sense that the final section is a natural progression from what has preceded it. This part of the film certainly gains from the splendidly natural playing of young Soya Kurokawa and of another child actor Hinata Hiiragi and it is intriguing in its own right for dealing with subject-matter that represents new ground for Kore-eda. But there is no sense of it evolving satisfyingly from what has gone before. Instead, it is as though what we have seen that far has been something of a wild goose chase, an overelaborate way to approach material that never called out to be handled as the conclusion of a narrative such as this. One senses that it could have been handled far more effectively had it been approached in a simpler and more direct way. It's even questionable how one should take the film’s final scene. The film’s title has been explained as referring to the idea that each person’s outlook influences what figures they see as being monsters but that's hardly an optimistic viewpoint. Consequently, it seems unconvincing for the film to end with a walk into the sunlight even if that is meant to be read as a symbolically hopeful close. One can see much in Monster that could have yielded a really good film but what we have is only a sad echo of what might have been and that makes it a major disappointment.
Original Title: Kaibutsu.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Sakura Andô, Eita Nagayama, Soya Kurokawa, Hinata Hiiragi, Mitsuki Takahata, Akihiro Kakuta, Shidô Nakamura, Yûko Tanaka, Daisuke Kuroda, Ryu Morioka, Ayu Kitara, Moemi Katayama.
Dir Hirokazu Kore-eda, Pro Genki Kawamura, Kenji Yamada, Megumi Banse, Taichi Itô and Hijiri Taguchi, Screenplay Yûji Sakamoto, Ph Ryûto Kondô, Pro Des Keiko Mitsumatsu, Ed Hirokazu Kore-eda, Music Ryuichi Sakamoto, Costumes Kazuko Kurosawa.
AOI Promotion/Bun-Buku/Fuji Television Network/Gaga.Toho Company-Picturehouse Entertainment.
127 mins. Japan. 2023. US Rel: 22 November 2023 (NewYork). UK Rel: 15 March 2024. Cert. 12A.
