The Needless Puzzle of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s ‘Monster’

The runaround structure of ‘Monster,’ Ozuian Japanese-gentle torchbearer Kore-eda Hirokazu’s return to his homeland– following a pair of international features rubbing elbows with French and Korean stars–is the first thing you’ll notice. From the first scene following the hostess club fire that serves as our Hong Sang-Soo-ian repeating temporal locus, Monster feeds us information about the troubles of burgeoning emo youth Mugino Minato (Kurokawa Soya), his cherubic bullied classmate Hoshikawa Yori (Hiiragi Hinata) and their cagey teacher Hori-sensei (Nagayama Eita) in piecemeal fashion.

MONSTER ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Kore-eda Hirokazu
Written by: Yuji Sakamoto
Starring: Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayama, Hinata Hiiragi
Running time: 127 mins

The big (and small) picture comes together over the course of three acts from three perspectives, the first Minato’s mother Saori (Ando Sakura), the second Hori and the third, finally, the heretofore scrutinized boys. Kore-eda doesn’t grant a tremendous amount of aid in reassembling the fractured drama puzzle by the end, a tack that unfortunately might have been more intellectually satisfying on paper than it is in practice.

The essential problem of the film is that once the pieces come together, it becomes apparent that the narrative wouldn’t make a lot of sense from a dramatic nor logical standpoint if placed in sequence. Behavior often strains credulity, and with the necessity of reengineering the narrative in the viewer’s mind, the gaps feel masked rather than repaired. Many threads also just hang loose, including what amounts to a third of the picture in Mr. Hori’s arc. Both his actual story outcome and his development are casualties of the secrets of the boys’ story.  Monster renders it an afterthought, and not in the sublimated meta sense of Barbie’s Ken.

In a traditional cut, Kore-eda could have eliminated the third of the film dedicated to his perspective, and his victimization may have actually proved more moving as a marginal figure. The central goal of the film is to show the consequences of lies for reputation’s sake, but in locating it in one character, rather than a mess of tangential tendrils out of view, it somehow feels smaller, less plausible, and structurally inefficient. 

At least there’s some pleasure in the Bazinian plastics. The turmoil of the vestigial childhood social hierarchy, playing out amidst the sunlit school interiors, is more reminiscent of childhood than most films that try. The nostalgia of its natural light rendering a clinical, light grey rubber location soft is the aesthetic substance of the film and it’s a shame we don’t spend even more time there, where at least the texture sings as it juxtaposes the textual corruption. The performances have merit as well: Nagayama brings an odd, frustrated energy to his erratic educator and Hiiragi truly seems next up as a child star (to the extent we’ll see him again in America), committing to a precocious rationalism that fringes on psychotic. It’s rare, however, for component individual aesthetics to shore up more central anatomical issues, and this is not an exception. 

Also, underfunctioning though it is, the scattershot gambit is at least mildly compelling in retrospect. The way the dots we must connect lack any Hollywood underlining presents a challenge that’s inherently worth taking up. But its resolution is too neat, by design, to stir the mind like, say, Last Year at Marienbad or a Blue Velvet. At the same time it also opts for a frustratingly textbook final ambiguity. No mystery remains except for a prefab, tacked-on one not worth solving.