Review by Beatrice On 20-Jul-2023
People need a monster to believe in. A real and horrible enemy. A demon in contrast with whom they can define their own identity. Otherwise it is just us against ourselves
Teenager Minato begins to behave in an unusual way and asks his mother:
"if you get a pig brain transplant, are you still human or animal?" a rather bizarre question that will reveal its relevance only at the end of the film.
The mother goes to the school because she knows that Minato's teacher is doing strange even violent things, so she demands explanations, apologies and reassurances. The principal, absorbed in personal grief, does not seem ready to address the issue and so do the faculty, but the boy's mother does not desist convinced that reason is on her side.
A fire, a series of inexhaustible entanglements, responsibilities, faults, prejudices, unspoken, presumptions of innocence and guilt, an uncontrollable adolescence, defunct, absent or intrusive parenting, and multifaceted identities take shape in a picture that is at times figurative, at times abstract though always symbolic of an inextricably engaging mosaic.
Kore-eda's family takes on new guises, dictated by contemporary society and especially by the new strand undertaken with The Third Murder, where history is only a pretext for representing a concept, a vision, a reality.
The monster has many forms or even only one but disproportionate and whoever wants, aspires, demands to capture it must come up against an inexhaustible investigation, multiple points of view, countless positions, indefinite perspectives: everyone has his own space and that of a child, a teenager, a parent, a teacher, a father, a mother are profoundly and immeasurably different especially when lived in dismembered yet patriarchal families, making Minato a sensitive and protective teenager to the small and suggestive Yori who makes his alternative world of tunnels, shelters, objects and drawings the only possibility of life and escape in an imaginary world.
An undeniable callback to Lukas Dhont's Close, with a seemingly less tragic outcome, with implications that are less effective for the theme itself but more sophisticated for the symbolic capacity and metalinguistic and conceptual dimension that Kore-eda's cinema now intends to follow.
Who is the monster?
That is the question and the main thread of the film.
Nothing is as it apparently seems; the initial, alleged, perpetrator, the victim, the companions, the friend, the father.
What is the truth? An insidious web of events, implausible at first, gradually comes crumbling down: the initial thesis loses focus in favor of an antithesis with the flavor of teenage bullying to unravel in the answer/synthesis to the initial question.
It builds to then demolish every narrative path Kore-eda takes.
Each clue slips onto the next piece, pointing out impossibility of pointing it out definitively: a perfect psycho thriller, where culprit and victim, cause and effect, means and ends, active and passive, omission and punctuation, imagination and reality seem inevitably assembled.
As is always the case in Japanese films, the rebus that unravels through the narrative finds its perfect fulfillment in the evolution of the screenplay.
A slippery film that of Monster, as if to indicate precisely in itself the indefinable representability: if the monstrous like the Kantian sublime comes out of the aesthetic canons of beauty to settle on those of disproportion, right here the director confirms, as he already anticipated in his previous The Third Murder, the reference to the impossibility of obtaining an answer, a solution, a unique and definitive truth.
There is no use being a monster if one is not at the same time a theorist of the monstrous
20-Jul-2023 by Beatrice
