Monster
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Written by Yuji Sakamoto
Starring Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayama and Soya Kurokawa
Classification N/A; 125 minutes
Opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and Varsity Cinemas in Toronto Dec. 1, expanding to other cities Dec. 8
Critic’s Pick
After taking geographical, though not necessarily thematic, detours to France (with 2019′s The Truth) and South Korea (last year’s Broker), director Hirokazu Kore-eda is back in his home country of Japan with the new drama Monster. And the return to a more familiar territory fits him well, as the thoughtful and complex film is as affecting, possibly more so, than his 2018 Palme d’Or-winning hit Shoplifters.
A story of dangerous assumptions and cold truths told from three separate perspectives, Monster opens with a massive apartment-building fire – a crucial marker of time that Kore-eda returns to throughout the film to demarcate his narrative splits. But the blaze is also a sly symbol of the destructive power of carelessness.
In the film’s first chapter, single mother Saori (Sakura Ando) and her grade-school son Minato (Soya Kurokawa) watch the fire from the balcony of their nearby home – a loving but somewhat haphazard space filled with tiny clues as to the pair’s wobbly relationship, in which the parent is more like a close friend. Saori has yet to move on from the death of her husband, while Minato has taken to acting out in bewildering ways, randomly cutting his hair or arriving at home with only one shoe. Eventually, Saori ferrets out a confession from her son that his teacher, the young Michitoshi (Eita Nagayama), is to blame for his behavioural troubles, causing her to lash out at the school’s apologetic but comically ineffective administration.
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Not everything is as Minato claims, though, with Kore-eda rewinding the drama back to the original fire, where it’s now being witnessed by Michitoshi en route home with his girlfriend. As the film doubles back to trace his in-class interactions with Minato, the film posits an entirely different view of intentions and guilt, which is further complicated by the third and final chapter focusing on Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), another student who might be a bully, a victim of Minato’s bullying or something more complicated.
Working with someone else’s screenplay for the first time in almost three decades, Kore-eda approaches his material with far more caution and patience than he afforded his own scripts for Broker and even Shoplifters.
In the film’s inch-by-inch pacing, sensitive but not treacly tone and even its delicately haunting score – the last work of acclaimed composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died two months before Monster’s Cannes premiere – there is a noticeable shift away from the sweet sentimentality of Kore-eda’s most recent work. And while the split-POV conceit initially begs comparisons to Rashomon, Monster’s three perspectives are not so much in argument with one another as they are pieces of the same puzzle. And once they are locked together, the final portrait is staggeringly heartbreaking.