The characters of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s (“Shoplifters”) films tend to fight a lot of demons. Some are inner demons, the recurring voices in their heads that say they aren’t good enough, that they don’t deserve happiness. Every now and then, we see these characters fight their demons in the arena of their minds, usually in a futile and self-destructive manner. Other demons are the people with whom they surround themselves, the ones who fill their heads with bad notions and ideas. They fend those off with actions and words — usually in an irreversible and life-altering manner. Sometimes, they are the demons themselves.
The cast of Kore-eda’s films also tend to prominently feature young children — like “Nobody Knows,” “Like Father, Like Son” and “After the Storm.” Kore-eda often engages these young children — who could be playing with dolls and toy cars — in situations that force them to grow up before they’re ready to. Their innocence is almost always the gateway into the director’s continual exploration of a harsh and cruel world. “Monster” is another such melodrama that abides by Kore-eda’s increasingly clichéd filmic tendencies … and it’s a problem.
Written by screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto (“We Made a Beautiful Bouquet”), “Monster” familiarly follows a young kid, Minato Mugino (Sōya Kurokawa, “Teasing Master Takagi-san”), who seems to be having a lot of issues at school and battling, of course, a lot of demons. In fact, Mugino, due to the internalization of his supposed bullying, wonders aloud if he’s a monster — a probing thesis question were it not wondered five times too many. This greatly alarms his single parent Saori (Sakura Ando, “Shoplifters”) who begins pointing the finger at school administrators who may have allowed the abuse to happen. Mugino doesn’t help his mother in this pursuit; he just keeps silent as her (and the audience) toil to decipher his self-loathing and general apathy to life. Notably, his mother targets a school teacher, bachelor Hori (Eita Nagayama, “Blue Spring”), who may or may not have abused her son.
All this happens in the first act of “Monster,” which, to be blunt, is a drag. Shit just happens. The audience is supposed to care because the film concerns a mistreated kid, but it feels dissonant, like a thumping score set to a leisurely walk. The plot quickly dashes by, and the characters more or less serve as vehicles for the idea that our cold system lacks humanity.
Then, the masterstroke — and the fatal flaw: Kore-eda switches the perspective. “Monster” is three films in one, taking the perspective of the mother, the teacher and Mugino in their subjective experiences of the same events. The film abruptly finds its true thematic focus when Hori is not who he is initially portrayed to be, as he turns out to be a great guy caught in a terrible storm, reminiscent of “The Hunt.” There’s a fascinating exploration about truths and lies: We get in trouble with lies, and we get out of them with truths, but the opposite is also true. The movie’s commentary on the chasm between interior and exterior lives surfaces as well; now, everyone is battling demons. It’s a reversal of the first act, and the film’s black and white turns into light gray and heather gray. As they say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover!”, or in this case, the first act.
But it’s hard not to judge, especially when Kore-eda switches perspective to Mugino, who is also not the person he was made out to be. Here comes that fatal flaw: “Monster” is designed to manipulate.
In the process of recontextualization — where Kore-eda cements the message of the film — the confusing (perceived or actual) actions of a character ought to gain significance, logically and/or emotionally. Instead, as “Monster” progresses, it’s as though the confusing actions in the first and second act were expressly designed to make the audience scratch their heads. When we learn exactly why Mugino has been behaving in this self-destructive and life-altering way — wreaking havoc in his wake — it’s as though the book’s cover was made to mislead.
“Monster” hinges on the idea that the audience is too quick to judge. What occurs in Mugino’s perspective, though beautiful and tender in isolation, threatens to destroy the cohesion of the film. The tale of misunderstanding is bogged down by the fact that, in retrospect, everyone mechanically behaves without an inkling of logic, exacerbating that misunderstanding. “Monster” quickly becomes a convenient narrative in which each character’s decision is grossly augmented to serve the theme.
There’s a grandmother character Makiko Fushimi (Yûko Tanaka, “Princess Mononoke”) with skeletons in her closet, whose granddaughter had just passed. She also happens to be the principal of Mugino’s school where he causes a hubbub at the same time that her personal struggles flare up — their struggles happen to poetically rhyme and amplify the drama tenfold. Oh, and Mugino has a single mother. Oh, and it’s also his deceased dad’s birthday. Oh, and Hori, the teacher who is caught up in the shenanigans, happens to create skeletons of his own at the very same time. Oh, and Mugino’s friend may or may not have done something that is the only reason why the plot exists.
Everything in “Monster” happens — with a heightened degree of self-consciousness — to manipulate the audience, to convince us that, indeed, the film is about a “failure” to understand truths and lies. But it’s not as revelatory as Kore-eda makes it seem, especially when the film wants us to misunderstand instead of gain understanding. It’s frustrating that “Monster” switches from a complex vignette about miscommunication to a convenient tragedy. Worst of all, Kore-eda tries to strike an emotional chord at the very end — a manipulation that falls flat because nothing that happened before rang true.
Although Kore-eda didn’t write the script for “Monster,” he’s been gravitating toward the same stories for years now: A warm family dynamic is uprooted in a morally perturbing way; after some tragedies, the story concludes with sweetness and melancholy, depicting the best case scenario in a situation where all roads lead to Rome. With “Monster,” I fear that Kore-eda has become a victim of his own perverse-turned-sentimental formula. His tendencies don’t serve him well in a story where the characters, fending off a hailstorm of demons, need time to breathe. Here, they are clunky instruments whose perversity feels unjustified. The sentimentality follows suit, coming off as especially hokey. By being so heavy-handed, Kore-eda has chipped the teeth of “Monster.”
Daily Arts Writer Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
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