Monster (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2023) (Patreon)

It may not be quite fair to say Kore-eda is in his flop era. After all, many quite appreciated his Palme d'Or winning Shoplifters much more than I did, and I've certainly missed a few of his films along the way (most notably his thriller The Third Murder and his French-language debut The Truth). But I myself haven't really responded to a Kore-eda film since Still Walking back in 2008. Although he's still a blue-chip arthouse director in the West, there's a debilitating middlebrow streak in his work that has much more in common with the sort of Japanese studio films that never expand beyond their domestic release. And while it's true that Monster shows some ambition, and an attempt to explore structure in a somewhat more complicated way than he usually does, Kore-eda just can't sidestep his most mawkish tendencies.

Told in three acts of unequal length, each from the perspective of a different character, Monster really is much less than the sum of its parts. That's because strange or inexplicable choices or behaviors that are intended to be explained by the other points of view often remain just as bizarre. For Monster to make sense, Kore-eda requires his viewer to buy into certain stereotypes about Japanese society, in particular that homosexuality is unthinkable, and that institutional bureaucrats will throw anyone and everyone under the bus to protect their perceived interests. While these ideas are perhaps true in a mitigated way -- there's homophobia everywhere, and bureaucracies are indeed self-serving -- Monster's plot structure relies on absolutely fanatical conformity as well as a deep-seated commitment to denying the obvious.

The first part is from the perspective of Saori (Sakura Ando) the widowed mother of Mugino (Soya Kurokawa), a boy in the fifth grade. Mugino starts acting strangely, obsessing over death and rebirth, and Saori suspects there's trouble at school. But when she talks to him about her future vision for him, having a wife and kids of his own, he opens the door and throws himself out of a moving car onto the street. The connection between these two things seems obvious, but Saori, shown to be a loving and attentive parent, behaves as if the concept of same-sex desire doesn't exist. And again, although homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality are very real, so is awareness that gay people exist, their presence documented in Japan at least since the Meiji period.

Similarly, when Mugino's accusations against his teacher Hori (Eita Nagayama) cause Saori to demand a meeting with the school principal (Yuko Tanaka), she and the other faculty members become robotic and inaccessible, repeating the same meaningless phrases to her over and over again. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they are bullying Hori, insisting he take the blame for things he never did, in order to "protect the school." While Kore-eda demonstrates that the principal's cowardice coincides with actions in her personal life, the framing of Hori demands that the viewer accept a stereotype of rigid conformity in Japanese society. Again, this attitude exists everywhere, but not in such an over-determined, narratively convenient way.

But Monster's biggest failure is in its extended third act, when Mugino's perspective is examined. Some of Mugino's actions make sense in terms of internalized homophobia and the conflict of burgeoning, unwanted desires. But as we learn about his attraction to his detested classmate Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), Kore-eda stumbles badly by fully exploring the other kid's experience. Hoshikawa is both an object of desire and a repository for toxic male hatred, starting with his own father (Shido Nakamura) who tells him that he has a disease, and repeatedly abuses the child. The fact that Hoshikawa is being beaten seems obvious enough. Hori meets the dad and can tell he's a creepy, violent drunk. And considering how much time Hoshikawa and Mugino spend together, it's hard to fathom that he wouldn't figure out what the effeminate boy's home life is like.

But this would short-circuit Kore-eda's roundelay of misunderstanding, in which the mom blames the teacher, the teacher blames Mugino, and Mugino lies to tell everyone at the school what he thinks they want to hear. At the heart of this conflict is a troubled boy, someone Hori admires and Mugino loves. But Monster treats Hoshikawa as the absent center of its plot, going so far as to kill him and Mugino off in a mudslide after the adults have sussed things out. They exist their train car and run away into blinding light, suggesting that theirs is a love that cannot exist within the real world. Again, we are asked to accept Kore-eda's view of Japan as a repressive neo-Victorian society, but it's the filmmaker himself who seems stunted. In Monster,  bullies cannot be defeated, and children must perish rather than submit to "the love that dare not speak its name."