Introduction

Hirokazu Kore-eda, who is known to write his own screenplays, could finally fulfill his wish of collaborating with well-respected screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto. Yet, this was not the only wish he could fulfill. With Monster, he also saw his hope to work together with renowned composer Ryuichi Sakamoto come true. With such talent behind the production, expectations were obviously very high. Yet, can this collaboration make our wish to experience another masterpiece by Kore-eda come true?

Review

Saori Mugino (Sakura Ando), a widow who works at the local cleaner called Momose, does her best to raise her fifth-grade son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), all by herself. When her son starts performing strange acts (e.g. cutting his own hair in the shower, returning home with only one shoe, … etc.), she rightfully starts worrying, yet her son succeeds in pacifying her somewhat with his quick defensive responses. 

Then one night, her son does not return home. By calling around, she succeeds in locating his bicycle and find him wandering an abandoned train tunnel, shouting ‘Who’s the monster?’ over an over again. On the way home, while Saori tells her son about the promise she made with his father, Minato suddenly opens the door and jumps out the riding car. 

Monster is a narrative that, by shifting the perspective of the spectator, powerfully underlines that the place one occupies within the societal field determines one’s interpretation, i.e. the way one combines signifiers to create a narrative that is both consistent and serves one’s own societal position (of mother, of teacher) (Narra-note 1). What makes Monster, in fact, so engaging is how its structure – the shifts to different perspectives and concatenation of fragmentary glances, forces the spectator to reach the same conclusion as the subject whose perspective is explored – we see the fuzzy shape of the monster they craft – as well as make him/her slowly realize that this ‘truth’ is nothing but a patchwork of half-truths and lies, a fabrication that, due to its fake and forced consistency, misses the real (suffering) of the Other’s subject.

Kore-eda’s Monster functions, in a sense, as a tragedy of understanding too quickly – an illness that has marked society throughout the ages, and a powerful corroboration of the importance of Lacan’s statement ‘Gardez-vous de comprendre”. So, to prove that the dimension of mis-understanding structures the narrative, let us delve a but deeper into the first two perspectives Monster contrasts.

The first perspective, the one of the mother, introduces a sequence of acting-outs from her son. The most evident acting-out is when Minato’s suddenly jumps out of the car. The signifiers – “Until you have your own family, your greatest treasure …” – that his mother addresses to him before his jump are not the cause of the acting-out in strict sense, but a simple trigger. Rather, Mugino’s acting-out constitutes a bodily answer to the future her signifiers paint. The most straightforward message his sudden act of self-harm formulates is that he, entrapped in his current subjective conflict, cannot imagine that kind of future for himself.  

Due to this shocking event, the spectator is led to assume that all Minato’s previous puzzling acts are acting-outs as well. What makes these strange acts acting-outs is that Minato, at an unconscious level, always ensures that they enter the gaze of the (m)Other: The hair he cuts decorates the whole bathroom, his single shoe is thrown around the entrance, some dirt remains in the water bottle his mother washes out, … etc. It is by offering a glance at his inner conflict that he subtly demands the (m)Other to unearth what ails him, to force him to vocalize what he has, yet, failed to verbalize.   

Another aspect, a societal one, that the mother’s perspective unearths is the hollowing out of the symbolic act. The apology the principal (Yuko Tanaka), the vice-principal (Humiaki Shoda), and Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama) offer Saori is an empty gesture, fuelled by social pressure, with no other aim than to protect the mendacious image of scholastic peace and shift the blame away from the body of teachers (Narra-note 2). The deep bow that follows the apology is nothing more than a formal act of pressure to silence Saori and the verbal insistence on ‘misunderstanding’ puts the responsibility outside the school’s hands (Narra-note 3). While the school tries to emphasize that things are smoothed out with their act of repentance, Saori cannot but believe that the destructive dynamic between Mr. Hori and Minato, the one forced to remain hidden behind the image of harmony, remains fundamentally untouched.  

However, some of Mr. Hori’s acts (e.g. eating a candy during the meeting to deliver his formal apology, sudden smiling during a serious confrontation, suddenly telling Saori that her son is bullying Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), …etc.) ripple the peaceful social image that the school wants to maintain towards the (m)Other – something is not (allowed to be) said. For Saori, who acts in accordance with her motherly ego, these acts proof that Hori is twisted.

The second perspective in the narrative, the perspective of Mr. Hori offers a different look at various events. Mr. Hori’s first act of violence, who is presented as someone who wants to do right by the students, is revealed to be an accident. It is in his attempt to stop Minato from throwing around the other students’ stuff and force him to apologize that he hits him on the nose.

Yet, the fact that Hori accidently hits him is not the most surprising revelation here. What stands out in the sequence is the acting-out and the apology. Hori is so focused on mending the fictitious image of harmony – one of the things a teacher is meant to do – that he refuses to read Minato’s strange act as a demand to the Other. The forced apology by Mr. Hori is, once more, an empty symbolic act that resolves nothing and silences Minato’s indirect expression (Narra-note 4).

The spectator also granted a look at the situations (e.g. shoes in the trashcan, locked up in the toilet, … etc.) that made Mr. Hori conclude that Minato bullies Yori Hoshikawa. While the spectator understands how the teacher, as passive observer, associated the events and signifiers together to craft his interpretation – his consistent truth, he also feels, due to the narrative shift in perspective, that these fragments do not tell everything and miss the truth.

Both perspectives emphasize that Saori and Mr. Hori, fixed within their own specific ego, blind themselves for Minato’s subjective position – they understand too quickly. What these adults ultimately fail to see is beautifully revealed in the final shift when the spectator perceives the sequence of events and acting-outs from the perspective of Minato (Narra-note 5).

Kore-eda delivers a composition that people accustomed to his oeuvre will feel at home in. The many still moments cannot short-circuit the sense that Kore-eda’s dynamic composition flows continuously. One could even argue that the master of subtle dynamism delivers a composition that mirrors the flow of subjective time, with its moments of warm inter-subjective stillness, slow steps of fearful anticipation, petrified bursts of shock, the faster pace of worry. The more profound fluid dynamic moments, on the other hand, allows him to exploit the beauty of movement and create fleeting moments of visual poetry.    

Subtle camera shakiness is also present in Kore-eda’s composition. Yet, the subtle shaking of the frame is not simply utilized to infuse a certain naturalism into the narrative’s unfolding – to increase its believability, but also to allow the naturalness of emotionality that oozes out signifiers, the face, and the body to reverberate more strongly. Yet, the fact that emotional moments framed with fluid dynamism have the same impact on the spectator underline that the subtle shakiness is but a decoration that lets the performances of Sakura Ando shine more brightly – the shakiness causes, in a certain sense, the spectator to pay close attention to Ando’s bodily presence (Narra-note 2).

Yet, even though Sakura Ando’s performance is impressive, the narrative would have been so moving and emotional were it not for the layered performances of Soya Kurokawa and Hinata Hiiragi. What makes their performances so engaging and touching is the fact they succeed to bring the emotionality between them believably to the fore.

Hirokazu Kore-eda strikes again with Monster. By being able to rely on an extremely talented cast, he does not merely succeeds in delivering an utterly engaging narrative about the fundamental misunderstanding that underpins our fabrication of our truth, but also an exploration of how the Japanese societal field, as marked by an oppressive atmosphere of harmony, suppresses the subject from entering the stage with his own subjectivity.     

Notes

Narra-note 1: Why do people feel the need to demonize another subject? To put straight, to defend the consistency of one’s ego (e.g. mother-ego, teacher-ego, …). The image of a demonized other, projected onto another subject, does not merely function as a shield, but as the very support of one’s ego. With such support, the subject does not need to question himself  or the Otherness of the other subject for that matter.

General-note 1: The veritable monster that is staged within this narrative is the societal fabric and those societal discourses that in reverence of an ideal (e.g. of manliness) radically silences and effaces the subject’s Otherness. While the father of Yori is the veritable representative of such destructive discourses, Minato’s mother echoes, not without any harm, how such discourses make up her subjectivity and shapes her expectations towards her son.   

Narra-note 2: The enunciation “We believe his instruction required the utmost attention” Saori is given by the principal is a very indirect reformulation of Hori’s brutal statement that Minato has a pig’s brain. Both statements put the blame on Minato and underline his inability to understand what the teachers says.

Narra-note 3: The emotionality also reverberates stronger in the scenes taking place in the principal’s office because it is contrasted with the cold repetition of the empty formal signifier verbalized by the principal and the people around her.

The narrative, in fact, powerfully shows the difference between a lived signifier – a signifier of emotionality – and the hollowed-out dead signifier that, within a formal structure, merely aims to protect the symbolic structure and its so-called imaginary consistency. And it’s the clash between a signifier fuelled with suffering and a signifier reduced to emptiness, separated from any inter-subjective meaning, that allows the former to resound more loudly.   

Narra-note 4: Monster also fleetingly evokes the fear schools of having to deal with monsterly parents.

Narra-note 5: This sequence also offers a harrowing exploration of the subjective impact of being forced in a formal machinery of empty apologies that merely aims to please the Other and maintain the fictive image of peaceful elementary school. What pushes Mr. Hori into a depressive position is both the fact that he is radically robbed of his own subjective speech and forced to become mediatized sacrificial object to safeguard the elementary school’s fiction of harmony.

Narra-note 6: Some of acting-outs stages a subjective conflict within Minato concerning the bullying that happens within his classroom. Some of these acts are a consequence of being sucked into the bullying while trying to stay out of it and wanting, without endangering his own position within the classroom hierarchy, to call a halt to it. Others echo a different conflict, which remains unseen as these acts are fluidly integrated into the mother’s gobbled-together ‘truth’ of Hori bullying her son. Some of Minato’s other acts are revealed to be no acting-outs after all, but a sign of bonding and kindness.