Monster review – heartfelt and likably earnest

With his narratively oblique yet emotionally legible new film, Hirokazu Kore-eda adds another entry to his scrapbook of fractured families and reconstituted makeshift substitutes. A woman grieves the child she accidentally killed, a sin claimed by her husband for public appearances’ sake; a mother and son celebrate a departed dad’s birthday with cake and one-sided conversations with his memory; a lonely kid finds the love his single father refuses to dole out in a blossoming friendship with a classmate. These currents of isolation, yearning and compassion wield the same quiet potential for devastation that’s synonymous with Kore-eda’s oeuvre. But working with someone else’s script for the first time since his debut — Japanese TV stalwart Yuji Sakamoto — the articulation of these feelings has produced uneven results.

The first form assumed by this shape-shifting drama holds together while foregrounding its structuring absences, odd inexplicabilities to be recontextualized by doubling back later on. Schoolboy Minato (Soya Kurokawa) has been acting strange. His mother Saori (Sakura Ando) can’t tell whether he’s tuck-and-rolling out of a moving car because youngsters do weird things, or if a pig’s brain has been implanted in his skull as he claims. She learns that he got this notion from his teacher Hori (Eita Nagayama), who seems to be responsible for the bloodied ear that Minato comes home with one afternoon.

In the most engaging section of a film that grows more scattered as it progresses, a battle of wills plays out between a teacher and the student that may or may not be trying to frame him for cancellable offences. Saori’s war on the school she sees as harbouring an abuser leads to light satire on Japanese workplace culture’s politeness-to-a-fault, the finer points of which may be lost on my fellow gaijin.

The second act pivots both to tenderness and disjointedness as Minato befriends new classmate Eri (Hinata Hiiragi), their bond solidifying as they make a clubhouse out of a rusted-out school bus. Kore-eda draws out the darkness surrounding this fragile friendship, tactfully pointing to the causes that compel them to forestall going back to their respective homes. He still leaves glaring question marks – chief among them the identity of the titular “monster” – just so they can be tied up in the final segment’s reframing of perspective.

Everything clicks into place as the audience clearly hears a mumbled line of dialogue the second time around, or sees through sheets of rain in an earlier typhoon mudslide. The sentimental wallop of Kore-eda’s technique takes a back seat to this writerly game-playing, more preoccupied with the sliding pieces of story than the catharses they should trigger.

The eventual reveal of the who and the why provides satisfying resolution, though the reward feels petty in comparison to the film’s freestanding pleasures: the tremulous discovery of love, the crystalline peace of unsupervised play, and above all else, the transportive score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, a masterwork within a minor work.