“Monster”: Is New Film Director Kore-eda Hirokazu’s “Rashomon?”

Kore-eda Hirokazu is back with his first Japanese-language film in five years — a rumination on our limited perception of the lives of others.

By Noah Oskow

If there’s one Japanese director of live-action film that can still easily be counted on to make thoughtful, high-quality cinema with appeal beyond the domestic market, it’s Kore-eda Hirokazu (是枝裕和). With a library that includes After Life (1998), Nobody Knows (2004), Like Father, Like Son (2013), and 2018’s Oscar-nominated Shoplifters, Kore-eda has been creating deeply human, quietly devastating films for over two decades. Now, with his new film Monster (「怪物」, “Kaibutsu“), Kore-eda has returned to Japanese-language cinema for the first time in half a decade.

Monster is the type of film you think about for days after you see it. It’s also the sort of movie that’s desperately hard to discuss without giving away plot and structural points perhaps best discovered via simply watching the film. It tackles concepts that are universal, but which also weigh particularly on the mind of many in Japanese society; conformity, bullying, othering, peer pressure, abuse within the school system. These subjects are taken on via the limited prism of…