Monster review: Hirokazu Kore-eda draws masterpieces in quiet desperation from his young stars

To suggest that every new Hirokazu Kore-eda film counts as an event is to deal in a class of reflected braggadocio of which the Japanese film-maker would not approve. For the past quarter of a century, since his oddball 1998 release After Life, Kore-eda’s profoundly humanistic films have approached life’s tragedies with the gentlest of steps. Reward came with, in 2018, the Palme d’Or for Shoplifters (whose plot eerily prefigured that of the following year’s triumphant Parasite). He then travelled to France for The Truth and to Korea for Broker.

This knotty, ambiguous, sometimes plain confusing drama brings him back home, but Monster seems, if anything, to diverge farther from his house style than did the two overseas films. It is bigger. It is more on edge. It is more prepared to lead its audience astray.

We should not then be surprised to discover that this is the first feature Kore-eda has directed from someone else’s script since his debut in 1995. Yuji Sakamoto’s story has much to do with the rash assumptions we make about children and the limited scope they have for escaping our prejudices. The film has bad news for us about humanity, but it also exudes a joy in the art of creative storytelling. All of which is a way of saying: pay attention throughout.

We begin with an uncharacteristically large calamity for a Kore-eda picture. A fire is burning in what turns out to be a hostess bar in a largely picturesque town. The film has something to do with discovering who set the blaze, but that is only one mystery in a cloud of uncertainties. Saori Mugino (Sakura Ando), a widow, is worried about the erratic behaviour exhibited by her son Minato (Sōya Kurokawa). His yearning to be left alone is typical of his age group, but what about his apparent cutting of his own hair and his stumbling home with only one shoe? After finding him in an abandoned train tunnel, she begins to suspect that his teacher, Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama), may be bullying him at school. The schoolmaster is eventually pressurised into apologising but later asserts that Minato is bullying another student, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi).

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That is barely the starting point of a yarn that makes much use of flashback to disabuse us of assumptions we really shouldn’t have made. One can hardly avoid referencing Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, not least because of the common geography, but Monster is not so interested in questioning its characters’ ability (or willingness) to relate truth objectively. This is more of a narrative kaleidoscope. Emerging from the film’s Cannes screening last May, this critic found himself arguing about who had done what to whom. The story is more slippery than that in, say, Anatomy of a Fall. Here we are sometimes not sure even what question we are supposed to be asking.

If Monster is more convoluted than the average Kore-eda film, it is every bit as connected to the frailty and compromises of the human condition. Always good with children, the director draws masterpieces in quiet desperation from Kurokawa and Hiiragi. Their struggles to make sense of barely understood adult motivation are universal.

Kore-eda also remains at home to his own variety of understated beauty. As the drama moves into the town’s damp borders, his cinematographer, Ryuto Kondo, gets to create a mythical space that points to fantastic escape. The director’s own editing retains canny elisions. Poignantly, what perhaps registers most strongly is a final ambient soundtrack from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto. The electronica veteran could scarcely have imagined a more affecting memorial.

Monster is in cinemas from Friday, March 15th