Movie Review: MONSTER ‘怪物’
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ and 1/2
On closing night of the 2023 San Diego Asian Film Festival, artistic director Brian He recapped the accomplishments of the past ten days and remarked how all three screenings of Monster sold out. When this year’s schedule for SDAFF was released and I saw Monster on the pamphlet, I immediately compared the screenings with open spots on my calendar. The first Hirokazu Kore-eda film I watched was Shoplifters in the summer of 2021, and slowly but surely I have watched a film of his every few months for the next couple of years. No matter that each new film follows a new set of characters, watching a Kore-eda film feels like stepping into a family reunion with all the associated joy and angst.
The magic of a Kore-eda film lies in how he depicts victories and devastations alike in both understatement and intimacy. Often, the first scene of his films marks the beginning of a trance that persists for the next two hours or so. It helps that the performances are always natural and mirror real life. Perhaps what stuck out the most to me in Monster, however, was the lighting and the humor. In his older films, Kore-eda preserves much of the natural sharpness of reality, whether that is to show the grit of Shoplifters or the heat of summer in Nobody Knows. In Monster, the scenes are often awash with a glow or fuzziness that throws everything into warmth. The film becomes an otherworldly experience despite being rooted in reality. Though dark undertones find their way into a number of scenes, humor is interjected in unsuspecting places that more than once elicited surprised laughter in the theater. Monster is in many ways Kore-eda at his most restrained and most hopeful, showcasing the light touch of a confident director.
And of course, talking about any of Kore-eda’s works is incomplete without mentioning the talented child actors who are so often at the forefront of the camera. Monster is structured in three acts, with each act adding depth and unveiling the mysteries that the previous act built up. The first two acts primarily follow Sakura Ando, who plays the mother, and Eita Nagayama, who plays the teacher, but the heart of the film truly unravels in the third act that follows child actors Soya Kurakawa and Hinata Hiiragi. Though Kore-eda is not a stranger to instilling mystery in everyday moments through purposeful omission, Monster is best consumed without reading too much into the synopsis. Rather, like all other Kore-eda films, the best way to enjoy it is to press play and enter the world he invites you into.
