“The best of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films achieve a rare quality: a sublime everydayness, in which simple matters of life take on breathtaking, poetic shape.

His new film, Monster, initially seems to be a simple, issue-driven movie designed to yank at heartstrings. Sakura Ando, so memorable in Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, plays Saori, a dry cleaner in a small Japanese city whose son, tweenage Minato (Soya Kurokawa), is having some mental health difficulties. He’s quiet and moody at home, he’s acting out at school, and in one frightening instance he seems to have a propensity for self-harm.

The film is essentially concerned with how a secret, closely held by private fear and societal demand, can affect far more people than just the one keeping it… The film, at once warmly exuberant and carefully restrained, is… built with the compassion and inventiveness so signature to its creator.”

– Richard Lawson, Vanity

IMDB: 7 / RT: 97%
Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan
2023 Drama / Mystery / Thriller, M
127 mins