Monster (2023): Reborn From the Ashes
Director Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest film is a heart-wrenching tale of perspective, parental responsibility, light, and love.
*This essay openly discusses the thematic landscape and plot points of the film. Read at your own risk.
This is a story about the end of the world.
Fire. An all-consuming conflagration engulfs a building in the city centre where a hostess bar lies on the third floor. The disaster draws everyone out of their doors. Kids from a local elementary school livestream the event from a nearby pedestrian overpass, reprimanded by their teacher who happens to pass by with his girlfriend, a hostess herself. A couple streets away, a mother and her son cheer on the firefighters from their balcony. A kid with a lighter watches from the hills.
Torrential rain. A hurricane hurls into the small town, uprooting trees and sending mudslides cascading down hillsides. The night of, the mother and son tape up all the windows. As she tucks him in, the boy mumbles enigmatic and strangely finite statements. Across town, the teacher stumbles upon a hidden message in his student’s essay. The next morning, the heavy downpour and strong winds continue. Two boys are found missing.
What we see is all we are prepared to believe in. Screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto challenges perspective, expectation, and prejudice in Monster, employing overlapping narratives and deceptive red herrings to derail us from our search for truth, or rather, what we believe to be true. Caught in a web of fabrications, we spend the entirety of the runtime demanding what’s real, wagering what’s not, inventing what we can live with. And when the fog clears, we realize that the truth was not ours to uncover, that we have destroyed a world that was never ours to possess. The question was never about who the monster is, but who gets to decide.
Containing all the humanist intricacies characteristic of a Hirokazu Kore-eda feature, it is almost appalling that the writer-director-editor, who has penned every script after his 1995 debut Maborosi, did not write this one. The project, initiated by Sakamoto and producer Genki Kawamura, brought together a host of masters including the late and great composer Ryuichi Sakamoto to craft one of the most empathetic and emotionally captivating tales of 2023. The film went on to win Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival, a testament to Yuji Sakamoto and Kore-eda’s fateful collaboration.
The film is divided into three chapters, three interpretations of the same event, bookended by a fire and a hurricane (the clash of elements was admittedly unintentional by Sakamoto). A mother, a teacher, a child. A still nighttime shot of the town, bordering a U-shaped lake and dense forest precedes each switch. This narrative structure was radically introduced to cinema by Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). While the complicity of Rashomon’s characters change based on each unreliable retelling, the characters in Monster don’t. “But the monster who appears, appears in different places,” Kore-eda explains. A phantasmal presence encases the mystery and melodrama, a claustrophobic construction of city streets and classroom walls. There are always cameras lurking in every corner, eyes and ears waiting for the dam to overflow. The world is collapsing in on itself. Let it overflow. Let it burn.
A recently widowed mother, Saori (Sakura Ando), watches her 11-year-old son, Minato Mugino (Soya Kurokawa), shrivel from within and doesn’t know how to help, how to be a good mother. He’s asking strange questions, comes back from school with fresh bruises, and would rather jump out of a moving car than speak to her. So when Minato reveals that he faces physical and verbal abuse by his new fifth grade teacher, Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), Saori is taking no prisoners. She launches a crusade against the school’s evasive and apathetic authorities, absurd and frustrating in their dedication to negligence. The battle culminates in the threat of a suit and Hori’s subsequent expulsion. The publicity of the ordeal causes him to be shunned for his purported cruel and unnecessary punishments. But when Saori finds Minato’s bed empty on the morning of the hurricane, she is thrust back into darkness.
Shortly after his onboarding at the local elementary school, Hori notices that one of his students is being bullied. No matter how often his shoes go missing or he’s pushed and shoved and laughed at, Hoshikawa Yori (Hinata Hiiragi) takes it with a smile. Coincidentally, the meek and reserved Minato has been exhibiting a troubling behavioral streak that Hori infers ties into Yori’s mistreatment. To counter Saori’s accusations, Hori explains these incidents and exposes Minato’s suspected bullying, but the school’s authorities aren’t interested in absolution, only appeasement. So the schoolyard becomes a nesting ground for party politics, and Hori is scapegoated. Demoralized and fighting self-destructive tendencies as his personal and professional lives crumble around him, he has lost everything. In hindsight, Hori realizes that he had misinterpreted Minato and Yori’s relationship, and treks to Minato’s house on the morning of the storm to apologize. The boy isn’t there.
The second chapter’s repackaging of Hori’s character from perpetrator to victim was initially a deterrent for audience sympathy. But as we sought telltale signs of cruelty found none, it was a shocking defeat in objectivity. Sakamoto’s intricately woven script capitalizes on the subjectivity of perspective to mislead and deceive, to throw us off the scent of the truth, just as the adults in the film had been steered astray by the children. But Minato and Yori’s deception is necessary. They have to protect themselves, to protect a world they have created that is their own, a world they know will be harmed if discovered.
Monster unfolds like a Russian doll, peeling back the layers until it arrives at the core of it all: a boy learning to love and to accept himself for loving. All the pieces crash into place—the secrecy, the looks, the bruises. Yori. When the boy who is so deprived of love and kindness wants to give him his heart, Minato doesn’t know what to do. Boys aren’t supposed to know flower names, aren’t supposed to be scared of the dark, aren’t supposed to like other boys. Yori’s father says that Yori has a pig brain, a disease. “If a pig’s brain was transplanted into a human body, are they still human?” Minato asks Saori. She says no. Yori touches his hair; Minato cuts it off. “I’m going to fix him,” warns Yori’s father. Minato finds Yori barely conscious in his bathtub. Mothers, fathers, teachers. The film interrogates the parties responsible for the education and development of our children, the patriarchal, heteronormative, and gender rigid society that conditions them to fear themselves, to believe that they don’t deserve happiness. The film throws the mirror back on us, operating from our siloed perspectives in the world. This is a world that needs to end. We are the monsters.
But Kore-eda refuses to dwell on the pain, the inverse which was a prominent criticism of Lukas Dhont’s similarly themed feature Close (2022). Minato whispers to his deceased father, “Why was I born?” The director answered this question in his previous film, Broker (2022): Thank you for being born.
Yori invites Minato into his refuge, an abandoned train carriage that shelters them from the storm. Rain beats against the windows, washing away the paint smears and mud stains. The world is going to end, Yori says with certainty, and they will be reborn. So when it arrives, they are not afraid. They’ve been waiting. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” Minato comforts his mother. The grey concrete walls melt away into electrifying green grass and blue skies, and the sun emerges once more. As Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final score rings out in the theatre, the children cross into a place we cannot follow, where they will finally be safe. All that remains are the sounds of unbridled laughter, a train chugging along its tracks, a trombone roaring into the night.
This is a story about the end of the world; and the birth of a new one.