Loyal readers will know how much I love Hirokazu Kore-eda, even standing outside the chorus that considered his 2022 drama “Broker” a drop in his usual quality. After two films in other countries (the other being the France-set “The Truth”), Kore-eda has returned to Japan with "Monster," one of his most moving and unusually constructed films. This one sees Kore-eda working with someone else's script (this one is by Yuji Sakamoto) and playing with form in ways the traditional filmmaker doesn’t usually. It’s a “Rashomon”-inspired drama that tells the same story from three perspectives, revealing how little we truly know about our children and culminating in some of Kore-eda’s most emotionally powerful filmmaking.

Minato (Soya Kurokawa) is a quiet but relatively trouble-free child who lives with his single mother, Saori (the excellent Sakura Ando). Saori starts to see changes in the middle schooler that grow increasingly troubling, including proclamations that he’s a monster and acts of self-harm. Something must be going on at school, right? When Minato reveals that a teacher named Hori (Eita Nagayama) has abused him, Saori meets a wall of unusual, defensive behavior at the educational facility, including a principal (Tanaka Yuko) who seems to be hiding something of her own. Hori reveals that Minato isn’t the victim; he’s been bullying another student. 

Or has he? The narrative then shifts to tell roughly the same chapter of time from Hori’s perspective, and finally Minato’s. They each reveal new motives behind the unusual behavior of Minato and Hori that remind one that we shouldn’t presume anything about even our loved ones, especially when they’re in the emotionally fraught stages of childhood.

Kore-eda makes sparse use of a gorgeous score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto—this is his last composition—and gently pushes “Monster” along a way that's never exploitative (unlike the overrated “Close,” another study of childhood connection and trauma that felt forced to me). “Monster” is another striking piece of work from a master, a movie that’s so carefully calibrated that you get lost in these characters, forgetting they're performers and not people caught up in a genuinely traumatic chapter of life. When “Monster” reaches an ending that I would call heartbreaking (but some consider ambiguous), it’s ascended to, if not the absolute top tier of Kore-eda’s work, right below it.

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