Monster

Story: A single mother frantically seeks answers from her troubled son’s school teacher after the boy starts acting strange. She suspects he is being bullied by the teacher, but the latter has a contradicting story, and both their theories seem further from the truth.

Review: Mom Saori (Sakura Ando) almost displays a maniacal energy in her relentless pursuit of truth. The school authorities maintain an impassive silence to her persistent queries and that aggravates her anger. Teacher Hori (Eita Nagayama) doesn’t plead guilty to Saori’s claims and in fact suggests that her son Minato (Soya Kurokawa) might be a bully himself to his classmate Yori (Hinata Hiiragi). Shifting timelines and contradicting claims are interrupted by a deadly storm and the sudden disappearance of the children.

Winner of the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay Award for Yuji Sakamoto at the Cannes Film Festival, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster is a seminal masterclass in storytelling. Every frame holds a meaning and compels you to read between the lines, cleverly evading predictability right till the end. The narrative unfolds like an intricate puzzle, decoding the film’s central mystery – Who’s the monster here?

You can piece it all together in the film’s third act that raises valid questions on our collective conscience and obsession with labels. Every equation doesn’t need to be defined. You get the underlying message on acceptance clearly but Kore-eda allows you the freedom of interpreting different versions of truth.

Ryuto Kondo’s cinematography and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music lend the film its tenderness wonderfully. While a mother-son story lies at the centre of this spectacularly mounted mystery-thriller, our inability to see through people and situations gets you thinking long after the end credits roll. This is filmmaking at its finest.