Monster (2023) was one of the best films of last year that no one saw, as is typical of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s (Shoplifters; Nobody Knows) films as of late. It’s also part of a worrying trend and aftershock of American politics in world cinema — the unnecessary questioning of the teacher’s role in society. In Monster, Kore-eda uses this story vehicle to affirm the teacher’s place in society, but, if like most American cinephiles this fall, you only saw the trailer for the film, you’d think teachers were a threat. It’s a great film built for the wrong moment, now out on Blu-ray in the U.S..
As the theater goer who monologued to me for an hour after seeing Brokers (2022) put it, Kore-eda is himself the empathy machine that Robert Ebert ascribed to all of cinema. Love and humanity are at the heart of his work, and in Monster, he cranks the empathy machine into the next gear.
The always wonderful Sakura Andô (Godzilla: Minus One), who previously collaborated with Kore-eda in the much-lauded Shoplifters (2018), plays a young widow, Saori, doing her best to raise Minato (Soya Kurokawa (My Beloved Flower)), a troubled and moody tween boy, who returns from school injured by his school teacher, Hori, played by Eita Nagayama (Blue Spring; Memories of Matsumoto). When Saori reports the incident to the school seeking safety and justice for her child, she encounters what seems to be a conspiracy of silence, led by a maddeningly stone-faced principal, played by Yûko Tanaka (Princess Monokem; Midnight Diner). This is the first of four acts in the film, and the first point of view. The film is non-linear and polyperspective, changing both present and flashback points of view during every act change. The game being played is to convince you that you know what’s happening, and who the good and bad guys are, before flipping it all on its head. This is not a story of good and bad guys, but of tragedy, heartbreak, and love’s perseverance.
All of these angles hinge around Minato’s friendship with his quirky classmate Yori, played by Hinata Hiiragi (One Second Ahead, One Second Behind; Don’t Call it Mystery). If they are friends, how they are friends, when they were friends, what are they to each other and why — these questions change minute to minute as the actors give the two best child acting performances of that year. These feel like real children with real problems, even as the story becomes grandiose.
Yûko Tanaka as Makiko Fushimi in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2023 drama MONSTER. Photo Courtesy of Well Go USA.
Across the cast, it’s Tanaka’s Principal Fushimi who I think about the most, not just as a figure of tragedy, but as a reflection of our real world. The living embodiment of institutional solidarity at any cost, her actions are infuriating, but also, incredibly understandable. Maybe Kore-eda’s greatest party trick is making us feel empathy for those covering up potential abuse and harm of a child, and maybe his greatest mistake. Yet, not for the reasons one might think.
Seeing Monster in theaters, I gave it 5 stars on my personal Letterboxd. It’s a great movie, and we’d all be so lucky to have a copy on our shelves. However, a few months after its release, the German film The Teacher’s Lounge (2023) was nominated for Best International Film at the Oscars, and last weekend I (mistakenly but that’s another story) caught the Turkish, Canne-darling drama About Dry Grasses (2023) in theaters. That film is about a Turkish teacher assigned to the wintry mountains of Turkey debating whether to leave or stay while examining his relationship to the women, both child and adult, around him. Both of these films are award winning films from major European auteurs about teachers who are perceived by the community as having done something wrong in the classroom. If you watch Fox News, or even NBC and ABC, you will have noticed something over the past few years, a shifting of the Overton window that has passed from the kooks to the mainstream, an idea that our overworked, underpaid, and underfunded teachers are pushing a “woke” or “trans” agenda. They are not, and that is a fact. There is no child who identifies as a cat using school-sponsored litter boxes, and every comment from bored teens saying “Yes, totally, I identify as a cat” in news reports are exactly what they read like — jokes to be taken as seriously as Moe the barkeep picking up the phone for a “Seymour Butz.”
What happens in American politics affects the world, because we are, if anything, annoying like that. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis calls gay teachers pedophiles pushing the trans agenda on little children one year, the geniuses behind Brexit and banning pit bulls follow the next. American film and Hollywood are driven by capitalism more than other countries are, often taking longer to respond to political moments than international art does, so it’s no mystery why the international community is responding to this unprompted crisis of confidence before America is. Our latest major teaching films, The Holdovers (2023) and Dream Scenario (2023), are about Vietnam and so-called “cancel culture’s” right-wing influencer pipeline. As glad that I am that these films are here and are picking up our cultural slack, I cannot help but feel queasy about their angle of defense. Monster, The Teacher’s Lounge, and About Dry Grasses respond to “the danger in the classroom” by responding with “teachers are people, too, have some empathy,” which is a ceding of the premise that should not have occurred at all.
L-R: Daisuke Kuroda as Shinagawa and Eita Nagayama as Michitoshi Hori in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2023 drama MONSTER. Photo Courtesy of Well Go USA.
We could be watching films about how the attack on teachers is a coordinated effort by the American GOP to dismantle the public school system and abolish the Department of Education by slowly redirecting its public resources to private, GOP-controlled charter institutions under the cover of moral panic. Instead, the filmmakers of our moment have answered with “everybody’s got problems.” Everybody does have problems, but instead, we’ve focused on problems that don’t exist. While the Southern Baptist Convention is in the news every few months for covering up pastoral abuse of children on a scale, let’s be real, that probably approaches the Catholic crisis exposed in the early aughts, my teacher friend has to notify the state of North Carolina whenever a child requests he call them a name that isn’t on their birth certificate, whether it’s a trans child finding the courage to experiment with their name, or a kid named Joseph asking to be called Joe.
Monster obviously, is not solely responding to American culture wars. It is largely responding to Japan’s sluggish path towards equality for all, a just and good thing that it does incredibly well. Yet, its American trailer from Neon, the only special feature on this disc, would have you believe that this is a thriller about a teacher hurting a child and teaching their classmates to go along with it.
Monster doesn’t stand alone, and neither does The Teacher’s Lounge or About Dry Grasses. If you study the relationship between science fiction and national anxieties over the last century, then you’ll know that what we worry about makes everybody else worry, and we’re worrying about the wrong thing. Why do we give power to creeps who spend so much time thinking about what’s going on in the pants and minds of ourselves and our children? Why do we ignore the truth that the men of the cloth, with their untaxed legal defense funds and sympathetic judges, are more of a danger to your child than the English teacher who respects your child’s wishes more than you do? Monster will age extremely well, but today it leaves an itch of worry in the back of my head.
Monster Special Features:
- English-language Dub
- Trailer
Available on VOD February 27th, 2024.
Available on digital March 12th, 2024.
Available on Blu-ray April 9th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Well Go USA Monster webpage.
Final Score: 5 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Home Release, Home Video, In Theaters, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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