Three-eyed beast

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This article was published 05/01/2024 (1001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This initially vexing, ultimately rewarding drama (in Japanese with English subtitles) starts with a spectacular fire. Flames are shooting up, fire engines are blaring, people are yelling.

It’s attention-getting, but it seems oddly out of place in a Kore-eda Hirokazu work.

In such films as Nobody Knows, Still Walking, Our Little Sister, After the Storm and Shoplifters, the former documentarian has crafted quiet, intimate, humanistic examinations of ordinary lives, especially the day-to-day worlds of the young, the old and the marginalized.

As it turns out, that big, showy opener is a bit of misdirection. The blaze ends up being a minor structural element, a way of marking a repeating timeline as Kore-eda, working from a script by Yuji Sakamoto, tells the same story three times, with each take giving us a different perspective.

What at first seems like an account of bullying at a grade school in a small provincial Japanese city opens up to become a complex, layered larger project.

Monster’s surface narrative — which seems to ask who that titular monster is — forces us to examine the nature of narrative itself, with underlying questions about how we respond to stories, and how we bring in our own assumptions, preconceptions and prejudices.

Minato (Soya Kurokawa) is a schoolboy on the brink of puberty. Mourning the death of his father, he seems troubled and unhappy, maybe even dangerously so.

Saori (Sakura Ando), his young mother, is loving but overwhelmed. When she fears Minato is being bullied by Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), an inexperienced new teacher, she demands a meeting with school authorities. There she receives an elaborate formal apology but no explanation.

We naturally identify with this worried parent, feeling her confusion and desperation, but the truth behind Minato’s baffling behaviour slowly comes into sharper focus as we replay some of these scenes.

The second approach gives us Hori’s perspective, laying out the bureaucratic dynamics of the school and its teachers. In the revelatory third pass, we finally gain direct access to the children, in particular the relationship between Minato and Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), a small, dreamy picked-on kid in his class.

As one tale told three ways, the film could be a stunt. And at times Monster does, in fact, come off as an exasperating cinematic exercise. There are moments that seem abrupt and awkward, especially on the first go-round. Conversations are deliberately truncated. Information is meted out in purposefully parsimonious ways.

There’s an exquisite frustration to the early sections as we’re left wondering why Minato cuts his hair, why Hori’s reactions are so odd and off-putting, why the principal (Yuko Tanaka) is obsessively cleaning the school’s entranceway and why there’s a weird noise coming from the music room.

But if these first and even second iterations can be initially confounding, they become satisfyingly fuller and richer in retrospect as we gradually learn more about the characters and their relationships.

As we head towards the devastating conclusion, we realize that despite its complicated superstructure, the film has been built on familiar Kore-eda soil. Like all his work, Monster is grounded in carefully observed emotional realism and given poignant, nuanced shading by naturalistic performances, especially by the youngsters, who deliver truthful, delicate and scrupulously uncute work.

We also see the thematic throughlines that connect the three sections — the cost of shame and guilt, the corrosiveness of family secrets and the perils of complacent, self-protecting institutional thinking.

Most of all we see Kore-eda’s empathetic exploration of the mysterious inner lives of children, especially those who are set apart by neglect or isolation or simply because they’re different.

The third act, which focuses on the two boys, is not just the cumulation of the previous two acts but a perfect piece of stand-alone beauty and meaning.

As with Anatomy of a Fall, another 2023 film about the tricky nature of truth, this third section will generate a lot of post-viewing talk in the theatre lobby. And that fourth act, created by the viewers themselves, as they sift through what they’ve seen and experienced, could be the most rewarding.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com