Last summer, I had the privilege of watching Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film Monster (2023) — now released in the Netherlands — at Hong Kong Broadway Cinematheque, the hub of arthouse cinema scene in Hong Kong. Although what originally drove me there was not the film itself but my survival instinct to flee away from the scorching sub-tropical summer to Cinematheque’s notoriously freezing air conditioning, Monster was a captivating surprise — knowing or expecting nothing from Monster turned out to be the ideal way to watch it. (If you haven’t watched the film yet, I recommend revisiting this article after viewing it!)

The film employs a clear three-act structure, narrating the story of a school bullying case surrounding two boys, Minato and Yori, from the contrasting perspectives of Minato’s mother, their teacher Mr Hori, and Minato himself. The different narratives sneakily confuse the audience about what really causes the strange behaviour of Minato. I find myself being “manipulated” to initially condemn Mr Hori for his abusive mistreatment of Minato, only to later sympathise with him as the second act unfolds how he has been deeply misconceived by the school after witnessing Minato’s misdemeanours. It is not until the end of act two that the romance between Minato and Yori is revealed, before the film suddenly turns into a vibrant, affectionate reiteration of the same story that has already been depressively told from the adults’ points of view. The judgements that the film wanted me to impose are proved wrong, even blasphemous in the third act, which beautifully delves into the two boys’ queer childhood and their puppy love.

Monster uses the narrative device known as the “Rashomon effect,” involving various points of view of the same incident. This term is derived from the Japanese classic Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa), a film about how a murder case is described contradictorily by four eyewitnesses. While Rashomon demonstrates the unreliability of epistemology (our ways of knowing the “truth”), Monster directs this unreliability towards the adult caretakers of misbehaving children — the “monsters” — and towards the audience. As the primary interpreters of each subjective narrative, we blindly trust the information presented to us through the screen and form our own subjective, normative presumptions about the incident. What makes Monster powerful is that it later contests the audience (together with the adult characters) in how we/they have missed a queer childhood by precisely highlighting the missed reality of it — a traumatic yet joyful reality, restoring subjectivity to the misinterpreted subjects of the queer children.

Such brilliant scriptwriting earned Monster “Best Screenplay” along with a “Queer Palm” at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Interestingly, Kore-eda, known for writing his own scripts for almost three decades, handed the reins to Yuji Sakamoto for Monster. Sakamoto’s filmography includes the popular Japanese series such as Tokyo Love Story (1991) and Our Textbook (2007), the latter also addressing the theme of school bullying. While many of Kore-eda’s previous films explore coming-of-age stories vis-à-vis (fictive) kinship, such as Like Father, Like Son (2013) and Shoplifters (2018), Monster offers a queer approach to coming-of-age — “queer” in terms of both its story and the way it challenges its own narratives and audience.