Year: 2023

Runtime: 126 minutes

Director: Hirokazu Kore-Eda

Writer: Yuji Sakamoto

Actors: Soya Kurokawa, Sakura Ando, Yuko Tanaka, Eita Nagayama, Hiiragi Hinata

By Sarah Manvel

“Monster” is about what happens when adults hate their lives, and how children, who are usually powerless to fight back when adults take it out on them, can exact sharp but misdirected revenge. It won both best screenplay and the Queer Palm at this year’s Cannes Film Festival but deserved neither. Director Hirokazu Kore-eda has made a career of telling stories about nefarious adults exploiting children in various unpleasant ways. At least here, working with writer Yuji Sakamoto, he has flipped the script. But that script makes a point of no one getting the treatment they deserve, and on reflection that means its awards were perfectly inappropriate.

Minato (Soya Kurokawa) is around nine and the only child of a widow, Saori (Sakura Ando), in a Japanese mountain city where single-parent households are vilified. When Saori sees bruises on her boy, she presumes he is being bullied for not having a dad and demands an explanation from the school. The school handles things abysmally, with the principal Ms Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka) even getting physical with teacher Hiro Michitoshi (Eita Nagayama, and more on him later) to force him to confess to Saori that he – not a child – hurt Minato. It’s bewildering, and Saori is right to be confused and horrified, but despite the school formally ending the matter that’s not all there is to it. It’s tough to believe Hiro actually did hurt Minato, even as the case plays out in public, but why is the school being so weird, and why would Hiro have confessed if he didn’t do it? Meanwhile another student is Yori (Hiiragi Hinata), a strange and friendless little boy to whom strange and frightening things keep happening, which he constantly and obviously lies about. The adult irritation with those lies serve to cloud the question of what really happened to Minato.

Eventually we get some clarity – the Queer Palm award will lend you some hints as to what drives the plot – but every second of that two hour and six minute runtime is felt, and not in a good way. The filmmakers deliberately blurred their own point to force dramatic tension and string out the run time, which is just exhausting. Ms Ando does excellent work as a normal mother behaving reasonably, but the ludicrous behaviour of the other adults damages the realism of her achievement. Mr Nagayama has an impossible part, made worse by the script’s requirement that, during a typhoon, he arrives at Minato and Saori’s home to personally confront the child who has cost him his career and his reputation. Not even the most suicidally upset adult would risk so confirming all the accusations, especially not in that weather. While Mr Nagayama does a wonderful job of showing Hiro’s kindness, the rest of the plot defeats him – as it would anybody. 

There are many ways in which people can act out of character and a situation can spiral out of control, but good movies pick ones which don’t leave the audience scoffing in disbelief. They also manage to make everyone’s choices – even the bad ones, especially the bad ones – understandable. The lies kids tell when cornered are usually understandable, but this is not a movie interested in exploring the aftermath of a mistake. It’s too busy gleefully lingering over how damage caused and damage done might turn people into monsters. For a movie with a gay theme this is especially offensive.

What a shame this was the last film for composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. We all deserved better than this.