The past few years of tiring disarray have only boiled up every individual's vices in the entire world, where it is so easy to label terms that shun connections due to one’s own flawed actions and words. It has an overwhelming effect on how humanity deals with the extremes, where within that ouroboros of piled-up confrontations, it overshadows truths and complicates how one deals with those morally flawed situations as social anxiety gets to every person. Furthermore only intensifies the cracks in one’s own humanity as the confusion occurring around them swirls into uncomfortable and exhausting territory.
For a director who delves into family structures falling apart yet finding specific characteristics that lift those connections despite the cracks, Hirokazu Kore-Eda reaches outward and explores the chaos that not only negatively affects families but also certain individuals and systems at large when said chaos eventually focuses on every individual fractured humanity and how it piles up to the point that there are specific truths that will be hidden away and never be told. On what may as well be Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s most outwards looking and diffuse film to date, ‘Monster’ takes a closer observation on how layered social anxieties, hidden truths, and back-and-forth confrontations break apart connections that only brush away groups of people when they’re hemmed in in those situations. Especially children who are coming to terms with their identity and are met with rejection and insults around them, hampering their voices to be heard and their yearning for love and acceptance to feel impossible.
Hirokazu’s embrace of this world-weary tone lends itself to how the film eventually proceeds throughout, with a non-linear structure segmented to show the perspectives of the mother, the teacher, and the two children all caught up in tangled conflicts and the hidden truths that are revealed within. Through the serene cinematography and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final scoring for the film, it manages to encapture lilting sceneries and compositions that make the film less of a wallow to get through despite the heavy tone that the film carries overall. Those specific elements lend certain scenes their magnificent power and heartbreak, the intimate component that Hirokazu still retains in his filmography work despite the different tangents he built on in this film.
Yet, as the film opens up with the building being burned, it immediately unfolds into whispers of information that skew the perceptions of people around certain characters in the film and eventually piles up to the point that the two main child characters are compressed in all of this as the tangled structure unveils more and more of the entire picture. Between all the hidden information, fractured confrontations, and hushed assumptions, the wells of comfort and intimacy amidst the actual brash treatments are plunged through the children’s point of view. Where, in their own little world, they have each other to find balm and joy in their identity and viewpoints as a hideaway from how people are treating them and referring to them as monsters.
‘Monster’ overall encaptures a storm of turmoil that unveils crushing information on how people deal with layers of frustrating human dilemmas, and how that eventually exhausts and suffocates the two main child protagonists as they make their way to find a place that calms them down in a community that is less accepting of who they are, easy to call them out as monsters behind their back. While Hirokazu Kore-Eda's direction alongside the calming cinematography, great cast performances, and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s last composition work are elements that are effective in conveying this thematic throughline, it is tough to take in given the jagged non-linear structure and the film’s intent to keep certain character’s flaws to be up in the air, which only makes the film even more scattershot as a result. Despite that, it keeps the emotional touches and thematic perceptions moving and insightful, opening the entire picture to show the viewer’s own weak spots and making the film’s emotional power even more potent, eventually informing what the title of the film even entails: the flaws and insecurities that make us bound to our fractured behaviors.