Heaven Is a Derelict Train Car: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster
Critics Campus 2023 participant Lauren Collee discusses the moral ambiguities and absolutes that emerge in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s tale of institutional malaise and tentative queer romance.
“If you cross the white line, you’re in hell,” Saori (Sakura Ando) teases her son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), as he leaves the house in the morning to walk along the road to school. Later, as they stumble home down an empty road from the hospital – where Minato has had his leg scanned after inexplicably jumping out of his mother’s moving car – Saori wobbles over the line. “Oops,” she says. “I’m in hell.”
It’s a throwaway remark, a silly tale designed to keep children from straying into the traffic; Minato is too old for it already. But it speaks to the fascination that Hirokazu Kore-eda – the director of the film in which the above scene appears, Monster (2023) – has with the obsessive ways in which people search for a clean line between salvation and damnation, between the guilty and the innocent. “Who is the monster?” goes a refrain that echoes throughout the film, in what turns out to be a mere children’s guessing game revolving around animals. The benign is misunderstood as sinister just as often as the sinister is dismissed as benign.
While Kore-eda is in familiar territory with Monster, which broaches the themes of family life and loss that underpin most his work, the film initially appears to signal a more surrealistic direction for him. Minato, our protagonist, is a fifth grader who, mourning the death of his father, claims that his brain has been replaced by that of a pig and begins to act in increasingly bizarre ways. In these opening scenes, Monster is gripping: its lens is paranoid rather than humorous; its comedy emerges from discomfort rather than affinity. But as the mystery unfolds across alternating perspectives and a more prosaic explanation emerges, Kore-eda’s film can’t deliver on the ambiguities of its premise.
Most of the characters at the heart of Monster are allowed, in the end, to bathe in the glow of Kore-eda’s signature compassion, but they are almost all at first treated with suspicion as we scrutinise their behaviour through Saori’s eyes. There’s Minato’s homeroom teacher, Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama), who has been described by his own colleagues as “creepy” and “shifty-eyed”, and has been spotted at the hostess bar that goes up in flames in the film’s opening scene. There’s the school principal, whose husband is in jail for manslaughter after he purportedly reversed out of the driveway and ran over their grandchild, but who – according to rumours – may in fact have been behind the wheel herself. There’s Minato, brooding and volatile. And there’s his unflappable classmate Eri (Hinata Hiiragi), whose relentless good humour in the face of unspeakable cruelty has an eeriness of its own.
The performances in this first third have a wonderful feeling of the uncanny, a knowingly stilted quality, to the point that Kore-eda seems to be teetering on the verge of an actual monster film: the realm of brain-eating zombies, shady science experiments in underground dungeons, the hybrid creatures of nightmares. What if a whole school, teachers and students alike, really have had their brains swapped with those of pigs? The principal and the teachers sway glassy-eyed in their chairs as they apologise to Saori in nonsensical bureaucratic language, pre-written and recited from a binder. Yes, they acknowledge, Mr Hori’s hand did “make contact” with Minato’s nose. We catch glimpses of Saori’s exasperated expression between the shapes of their genuflecting bodies, which move with disquieting uniformity. “Are you human?” she asks them. It takes the principal a beat too long to respond.
Monster
In these scenes, all seen from Saori’s perspective, Minato is a fugitive and vulnerable presence, always slipping out of his mother’s grasp, legible to her – and to us – only through the traces he leaves behind: shorn clumps of hair; a single sneaker; a roadside sign saying “I’m here”. Perhaps it is because Kore-eda invites such scrutiny from the outset that the remainder of the film feels comparatively short on intrigue. As it leaves behind the mystery and becomes a love story, Monster also shifts from the world of the adults to that of the two children: a world in which violence only ever momentarily interrupts the reverie of play. The tangle of yellowing school corridors that lend the earlier scenes a gothic feeling of entrapment give way to wide open spaces of green. The terrifying anarchy of the school classroom is mirrored by a dappled shadow-classroom in an abandoned train carriage where homemade creations hang from the ceiling, a small and contained utopia of Eri and Minato’s own. If there is tension in these latter scenes, it is only the easy tension of inevitable love – a spiritual love, with only the ghost of a kiss, and no exploratory fumbling.
But while it is entirely possible for children to fall in love passionately, the world of the child is full of exploratory fumbling and petty grievances, less so perfect spiritual unions. Kore-eda’s fascination with the way adults fail to understand children doesn’t necessarily stop him from falling into that trap himself. While there is a natural chemistry between Eri and Minato – the former is airy and gentle; the latter, moody and impulsive – the deep romantic bond that develops between them is a little sentimentalised at best and sanitised at worst. The film is charged with queer yearning and playful physical contact, so why aren’t they allowed to kiss?
Eri is a victim of severe abuse at home, but, as a character, he’s a bit too perfect. The suggestion that he was responsible for burning down the hostess bar is left as just that – a suggestion – and the act seems difficult to reconcile with the placidity of his character. Meanwhile, the evil that seeps into their world finds a clear origin point in a host of unambiguously villainous side characters: Eri’s alcoholic father, who hits him and accuses him of infecting others with his “pig brain”; and the gaggle of class bullies, who hound Eri relentlessly and extend their punishments to Minato if he does not join in. Confined to the film’s shadowy edges, these peripheral monsters don’t ever get the kind of screen time that would force Kore-eda to multiply their shades of grey.
At the heart of Monster is a call-and-response punchline: Who is the monster? There is no monster. Evil is not a white line on the road that you can trip across. But there are monsters here – we just don’t see much of them. In lieu of bringing these characters into the foreground, Kore-eda finds an easy narrative climax in another threat from the outside: a storm that threatens the city. A building of tension, and then a release: the natural fluctuations of atmospheric pressure. When the storm has passed, we find ourselves left in a world where heaven is still heaven, and hell is still hell.