Like most films by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Monster begins quietly, tracking the shoes of a child as they silently navigate a grassy embankment. The movement is furtive, hesitant; the boy we are following seems uncertain of his destination, yet cordoned in his wandering by fear of reprisal. Beyond him, electric lights glimmer in reflection upon a dark river, while the sirens of the city howl in the distance. We pull up: a firetruck, a bustling crowd, and a great burning building looming in the distance. How can such an aberrant form coexist with this gentle moment, this private odyssey of youth on the riverbanks? Odd how a panning of the camera can change a scene so utterly, make beauty into ugliness, or the terrible glorious to behold.
Monster is a film about such tricks of perspective, realized most dramatically through its Rashomon-esque narrative structure. We begin by following the young widow Saori Mugino, whose son Minato seems to be having trouble at school. He arrives home late missing a shoe, he cuts his own hair and refuses to explain why, and he accumulates bruises and scars with worrying regularity. Eventually, Minato tells her that his teacher Mr. Hori has been hurting him, physically striking him and calling him a beast with a “pig’s brain.”
Saori contacts the administration, and the teachers close ranks around Mr. Hori, who seems abominably undisturbed by his own vicious actions. How can a man be so monstrously indifferent to the suffering of his students? And how can his fellow teachers care so little about her son, treating Saori only with polite dismissal, not a hint of kindness in their eyes? Still, justice is eventually served: Saori’s complaints lead to a formal inquiry, and Mr. Hori is removed from his post.
We then jump back in time, following Mr. Hori from the beginning of the alleged incidents. We see a man who’s earnest yet awkward, dedicated to his students, yet often misjudged due to his nervous smile and tendency to laugh at the wrong times. His girlfriend teases him about his odd nature, but he is happy enough with himself; truly, the only complication in his life is his student Minato, who bullies his classmates and breaks into inexplicable fits of rage.
When Mr. Hori attempts to reason with his antisocial student, he becomes the target of a merciless campaign of defamation. Minato apparently lies to his mother about Mr. Hori physically abusing him, and Hori is forced to defend himself against one vile untruth after another. The teachers around him at first tell him not to worry, but bar him from truly engaging with either Minato or his unreasonable mother. Their concern flips the moment the school is implicated; Hori is sacrificed as a scapegoat, his life destroyed such that the school might maintain their reputation. In the end, he can only call out to Minato with tears in his eyes, wondering what he did that was so horrible, why this boy would destroy him for no reason at all.
And then, there is Minato. Turning back the clock once more, we learn of a boy frightened by his own feelings towards his classmate Yori. Yori is bullied by the others for his unusual, “unmanly” nature, and Minato is caught in the middle, hungry for more time with Yori yet terrified of being similarly abused. The two make a sanctuary of an abandoned train car, hanging lights and drawing pictures, savoring the moments when they are not asked to perform in a stranger’s skin. It is Yori who feels he has a “pig’s brain,” a flourish of venom offered by his bigoted father, and Minato who tells him he is fine as he is. But difference invites judgment, and even Minato’s attempts to help his friend invoke painful consequences.
The monster of this film’s title is fluid – not a stable form, but a designation we apply to that which is monstrous to us, that which has invited nothing but unconscionable cruelty into our lives. It is Mr. Hori giggling as Saori explains her son’s abuse, seemingly reveling in his own cruelty towards his innocent charges. It is Minato staring blankly back at Hori, incapable of summoning one word to explain his destruction of Hori’s life. It is whoever is unreachable to us, whoever’s unknown interiors seem so antagonistic to our dreams that we cannot even recognize them as human. “Can’t you for once speak to me as a human being,” Saori begs the school principal. “We are taking your opinions under careful consideration,” comes the monstrous response.
Save Yori’s father, none of the figures centered in this film want anything but the best for themselves and those around them. And yet, through the friction of experience and miasma of misunderstanding, they render themselves unrecognizable to each other, and at times even to themselves. Minato struggles with a burgeoning understanding of self that seems to threaten everything around him; first introduced as a ghost reflected in glass, he seems to exist between this world and the next, perpetually wondering if he might be “reborn better” if he were to leave this world. Mirrors are omnipresent, and railings as well – the borderlines of life and death, the ease with which we might slip from mundane existence into irreconcilable tragedy. At least the physical railings announce themselves; whatever boundaries Minato and Hori slip beyond seem invisible, a trick of the light that leaves them floundering for steady purchase.
Who burned down the complex with the hostess club? How did the cat behind the school actually die? Why did that image of the “pig’s brain” stick so fast and so cruelly inside the minds of Yori and Minato? Monster raises more questions than it answers, because the answers are insignificant: it does not matter the truth of an event, only how that event impacts and is interpreted by those left in its wake. The cruelty of one father and the anxious conformity of youth; such sparse kindling is enough to ignite the lives of all of Monster’s players, spurred on by the ease with which we putty over cracks in understanding with monstrous assumed intent. We are too fragile to always assume the best; we all stare into mirrors and doubt the reflection, hang at our own railings and gauge the drop. And it is precisely those similarities that divide us, frightened as we are of discovering the lighter cradled in our own hands.
“Life is a practice,” Kore-eda perpetually insists. Family is an imperfect agreement, childhood is a messy road, and adulthood most confusing of all. Sometimes we will find ourselves divided by circumstance, and sometimes our own existence will feel so intolerable as to invite damnation. We all have our demons, or at least regrets that might seem demonic by a certain trick of the light. And thus our monsters fester in the dark, when it is only the glare of common understanding that might exorcize them for good. “I can’t tell them that I can never be happy,” admits Minato to the school principal, thinking back on his mother’s obliviously cruel “I need to protect you until you’re married and have a family,” to Mr. Hori’s idle, scathing “you’re a man, aren’t you?” “That’s nonsense,” she replies. “Happiness is something anyone can have.”
Perhaps, perhaps. The principal is uncertain of her own words; she is only saying what her student needs to hear, and likely what she needs as well. But are such hopeful intentions any less true than the darkness we conjure, than the cruel sentences we assign ourselves? Happiness is, like everything else, a matter of perspective: sometimes we are contemptible creatures, and sometimes we are actually beautiful, our beauty merely obscured beneath the grime.
Monster ends on another Kore-eda custom, a great storm that we can only bunker down against, hoping to emerge into a world that is as beautiful and new as we wish ourselves to be. Saori and Hori find common cause in the storm, racing to save Minato, their fingers carving a window through the mud-streaked train car glass. Their desperation crafts a portal through the reflection, a true window from one earnest soul to another – but in truth, they needn’t have bothered. Minato and Yori have already escaped the storm, crawling along a drainage tunnel towards a light in the distance, emerging muddy but otherwise themselves.
“Were we reborn?” Yori wonders. “We weren’t, we’re the same,” Minato replies. “Ok, great,” says Yori, eager to explore this new world, happy to share his true self with his friend. In the clarity after the rain, all that is seems beautiful and clean, perhaps broken, but never beyond repair. Rebirth need not be so total, nor so violent; let the rain wash away all that divides us, and bask in the sun as the clouds inevitably break. If monstrousness is just a trick of the light, then happiness might be just as ephemeral. If nothing else, let us seek it together.
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