Monster (2023), BBCiPlayer,  Screenwriter: Yuji Sakamoto (Winner of the Best Screenplay Award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival), Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002zljp/monster

‘What is truth?’

Pontius Pilot is alleged to have asked this kind of question before passing judgement. It may have seemed to him a sensible thing to do. For Judeans that was passing the bronze prutah. An institutional washing of the hands that predated Moses.  

Monster has a tripartite structure. It looks through the lens of the story from different points of view.

Saori Mugino (Sakura Andō), Minato’s mother, wants answers. She is a single mother. In Japan, with its hierarchical society (as elsewhere in conservative societies), that’s frowned upon. Minato (Sōya Kurokawa) is her everything. But he’s been acting up. Not wanting to go to school. He always loved school.

She’s looking for answers and finds them. Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), his schoolteacher, has been picking on her son. He is the Monster.

The school administration and Makiko Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka) the School Principal, offers endless apologies while doing nothing. They too are the bureaucratic monsters protecting the school’s reputation.  

Truth is nine-tenths perception. Mr. Hori may not be the monster he’s made out to be. As we step into his point of view, he may be the opposite. Truth may be as elusive as compassion.

In a shifting point of view, the children’s perspective reframes the adult viewpoint and becomes something sweeter. Noble even. In a coming-of-age drama in which internalised feelings and societal views of what is normal when Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi) and Minato create a little paradise in an abandoned railway carriage. Shaming brings its own monsters—and heroes.

A film worth watching more than once (but I probably won't).