Monster

Winner! Best Screenplay, Cannes Film Festival 2023

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters) returns with this deeply affecting and morally complex drama told through multiple perspectives. Quiet and reserved Minato (Soya Kurokawa) — no longer a kid, but not yet an adolescent — lost his father when he was a young child and lives with his mother (Sakura Ando). When he starts behaving strangely, obsessed with the idea his brain has been switched with a pig’s, his mother suspects his teacher Hori (Eita Nagayama) is somehow responsible and calls a meeting with the school principal (Tanaka Yuko), only to face a wall of silence and stiff apologies. Someone must have put that idea in Minato’s head, but something doesn’t add up. Is Minato telling the truth, or is his professor innocent? As the story unfolds through the eyes of mother, teacher and child in a Rashomon-inspired structure, the truth gradually emerges, a truth that may change the course of all their lives. (Dir.by Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023, Japan, in Japanese with English subtitles, 126 mins., Rated PG-13)

Other festivals: Cannes, Toronto, Munich