Monster

Monster (2023) tells one set of events three times, through three different people. In the first part there is a mother. Her son Minato starts behaving strangely: he cuts his hair, a shoe goes missing, one day he jumps from the car. She goes to the school and learns his teacher struck him. The administration is oddly cold; they apologise and none of it is real. In the second part the same events are told through the teacher, Hori, and the picture changes entirely. He witnessed something and cannot say it; rather than protect him the school sacrifices him. In the third part the children have their own story, and there it becomes clear what happened. Every misunderstanding in the first two parts comes from something two boys could not tell anyone. The title comes from a children's game and its question is who the monster is. Kore-eda directed; for the first time someone else wrote the screenplay, Yuji Sakamoto. It won the screenplay prize at Cannes. Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote the music and it was his last film score; he died in March 2023, shortly before the film was released. The child actors carry the film. A storm sequence ties the ends of all three accounts together. The judgment you reach watching the first part collapses in the second; the film accuses the audience of judging wrongly as well. It runs 126 minutes. Good for: Japanese cinema, multiple perspectives, and family drama. Less good for: the pace is slow, the first part is deliberately misleading, and suspicion of child abuse is part of the subject.