Monster (2023)

Hirokazu Kore-eda takes a screenplay he did not write and assembles it three times over, each pass peeling back a layer of the same small catastrophe. A single mother sees her fifth-grade son come home with one shoe and a haircut he gave himself, and she does the reasonable thing: she demands answers from a school that would prefer the matter stay indoors. The faculty apologize without apologizing. A teacher becomes a suspect. The reputation of an institution is protected at the expense of everyone inside it. This is the first act, and it plays like a quiet procedural about bureaucratic cowardice.

Then the film turns, and turns again, and the suspicion curdles into something else. The two boys at the center, Minato and Yori, are not the victim and the bully the adults keep naming. They are in love, in the tentative and wordless manner of children who have no vocabulary for it and no safe place to say it aloud. Kore-eda films this with a tenderness that never announces itself. A shared railcar, a hand in someone's hair, a question about whether they have been reborn. The film took the Queer Palm at Cannes, a distinction its marketing had apparently been at pains to conceal, which reads now as its own small act of institutional cowardice.

Nothing here lectures. The school bureaucracy is indicted, but the film has no interest in economic systems or identity checklists. It wants us to sit with the awful fact that everyone was telling a version of the truth and every version was incomplete. The result is humane, restrained, and almost entirely free of the sermonizing that this decade tends to reward. A gentle, devastating piece of work. It earns its compassion the hard way: by refusing to hand us a villain.

A note for the ledger. The central romance between two boys supplies the only substantial marker of contemporary social consciousness, and it is handled with a delicacy that resists the usual framing. The preachy instincts of the age are largely absent. This is a film about a mother, a teacher, and two children, told from three angles, and it trusts the audience to assemble the pieces without instruction. That restraint is the rarest thing in it, and the most welcome.

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