Monster (2023)

Kore-eda Hirokazu is my favourite director working in world cinema today, and all the finest qualities of his work, particularly when working in Japan and and with child actors, are on display here.

 

But not his writing, because the screenplay was produced by Yûji Sakamoto, most noted for his plays, television scripts and song lyrics.

Its episodic structure, featuring three re-treads of the same temporal ground, will have people reaching for their Rashōmon comparisons, but these are not three separate, subjective interpretations, but rather alternatively-skewed re-tellings, blending some things we've seen with things we haven't, with an adjusted mix of protagonists, central and support, seemingly with an objective of adding a bit more murk even as some clarity gradually emerges.

Within this tripartite structure, the narrative is a little disjointed with perceptible gaps that deliberately disrupt the experience of flow between scenes.

All this means that, on some levels, Monster feels a bit like hard work. 

It certainly didn't help that in the version we watched, the hard-coded subtitles were a little off. It wasn't so much that the language was inaccurate, just that the way it was rendered came across as mechanical and affectless, and I'd imagine that the precision and tone are very important to this Cannes Best Screenplay winner. (It also took the Queer Palm in 2023.) 

We also felt there were a few cultural references that went flying past us, and the ambience of urgent unfamiliarity was perhaps accentuated by the setting, around Lake Suwa (in Nagano prefecture), characteristic of a form of Japan one rarely comes across in the movies.

Freed from the need to tell the story with words, Kore-eda is conspicuously devoting himself to the visuals. He calibrates the colour palette in a manner I've not seen done before, which is both fun and a little distracting (one has a sense of being bombarded with details, foreground and background) and some of the scenes have that exquisite, ethereal quality which one tends to associate with the hand-drawn animations of Miyazaki — complemented by the equally diaphanous final score of the late Ryuchi Sakamoto.

Is Monster worth all the heightened attention (and sensibility) it appears to require? Resoundingly yes, I would say. 

(For the record, one reviewer on IMDB commented that the 'monster' of the title is Japanese society and its mores. This is very much NOT a horror movie, but there does seem to be an underlying premise at work in the story that this society can sometimes function as a hall of mirrors, making it that much harder to make observations without perceiving malformations which are not really there.)