ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Spoiler warning!

Acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda is universally known for making absorbing films dealing with children who have either lost one or both their parents or have a parent who excels at selfishness, neglect and abuse. 

His 2023 film Monster is no exception. 

The film is a modern variation of Akira Kurosawa’s seminal Rashomon in that it chronicles a series of events from different perspectives. It cuts together almost like an anthology, using summertime Kagoshima and its surrounding as a romantic backdrop. The first telling of the events, which begins with a fire in a tower block, comes from the point of view of Saori (Sakura Ando), a supportive, if overprotective single mother raising her 5th grader son Minato (Soya Kurokawa) alone following the death of her husband. Minato is a child who seems to have a lot of secrets, frequently riding his bike off into the mountains and returning home sullen with only one shoe. 

Once his overprotective mother begins to suspect her son is being bullied by his teacher, Hori Sensei (Eita Nagayama), all bets are off. Saori confronts the school with one goal in mind – to get them to admit Hori’s wrong-doings. Of course, the administrators will do everything in their power to protect the school’s reputation. 

The film then switches to Hori’s POV where we find out, shockingly, that Hori never abused Minato. From his point of view, he is the victim. It’s Minato who is the villain, falsely accusing him. Hori loses his job and his girlfriend, all the while trying to protect a smaller boy in the class from Minato’s bullying. 

We then switch to Minato’s POV, where it turns out Hori was wrong about him, too. 

Minato and his perceived victim, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi) are secretly best friends, spending all their time together in the nearby mountains, creating their own world in an abandoned rail car. 

Neither of these boys “fits in” with the other kids at school. Yori is the brunt of the entire class’s pranks, and they constantly tease him for being quiet and different. 

While getting to know each other, the two boys find they have a lot in common. They’re both at the age where they are becoming aware that they are gay. Minato’s father is dead and Yori’s mother has abandoned him, leaving him alone with his alcoholic, homophobic physically abusive father. The father is the one true “monster” in the piece. An angry drunk who tells anyone who will listen that his son has the brain of a pig and that the boy must be “cured” of his “disease” of not being “a man.” 

Yori lashes out secretly, setting the fire from the beginning of the film where his father frequents the hostess bar in the block.  

The best parts of the film are Hori’s story and the growing relationship between the two boys, delicately portrayed by the film’s excellent child actors. It perfectly captures what it was like to be 11 years old, not yet fully sexually aware, but with a growing awareness of pre-pubescent feelings. 

There’s also a subplot dealing with the principal at the school, who accidentally backed up over her grandson, killing him. We never find out if she did it on purpose, but we do that she has let her husband take the fall for her actions. We also see her deliberately trip a young child in the supermarket. Is she also a monster? Just when you think you’ve got her figured out, Kore-eda gives us a heartwarming scene between her and Minato in the music room at school where she tries to guide him through the difficulties of his emotions through making a lot of silly noise with brass band instruments. 

In the end, everyone realizes they were wrong. Hori and Saori come together to find the boys who have gone missing in a typhoon having run away together to protect Yori from his increasingly violent father. 

Sadly, the boys both die in a mudslide when their “safe” railway car is crushed in a mudslide. We never get to see the emotional impact of their deaths for any of the adults in the film, rather we are gifted with the final bittersweet image of the boys, running off together into the sunny afterlife, free to be their authentic selves. 

Ultimately, the film is about perspective, assumptions, and misunderstandings. As a ghostwriter of autobiographies, I deal with this concept every single day. Monster perfectly illustrates the idea that everyone is a hero in their own story, and the villain in someone else’s. 

Children? They don’t worry about it. They just get through their school day, have fun and explore their worlds, inside and out. Adults should give them a support system that allows them the freedom to grow up to be their authentic selves. but as Kore-eda has shown us time and again in films like Nobody Knows (2004), adults are very often huge jerks, even when they don’t mean to be, and the only remedy is for kids to build their own chosen families.