Hide and seek: "Monster"

Following excursions to France (for 2019's The Truth) and Korea (2022's Broker), Hirokazu Kore-eda has returned to Japan for a story that really needs to be told in a native tongue. Monster is an exceptionally nuanced and layered drama, written in a way that demands both precision and delicacy, rooted as it is in subtly divergent perspectives on the same series of events. It opens with a fire in an apartment block, as observed from a safe distance by a single mother (Sakura Ando) and the secretive pre-teen she's struggling to raise (Soya Kurokawa): an early illustration of this narrative's guiding principle, which is that it all depends where you stand. Yet even as a fire crew puts the conflagration out, other mysteries blaze on. Why is the building on fire? Why does the boy later throw himself out of his mother's car? And what does it have to do with the young teacher (Eita Nagayama) rumoured to be spending his nights with a hostess at the bar that was ground zero for the towering inferno we witness in reel one? That fire provides something of a smokescreen we will spend the next two hours peering through, yet as the smog lifts and clears, we start to notice a shift in this filmmaker's own perspective. In earlier Kore-eda films, children were typically regarded as angelic joy bringers. Some of those cherubs can still be spotted on the margins here, but Monster is the first Kore-eda to centre a youngster who appears as complicated, difficult, sometimes as outright cruel as the rest of us are capable of being. The M-word shifts around - it's heard in a song, and later used in a card game - but there are reasons for that title, expertly revealed as the film goes on.

Rarely can a title and a camera have felt more like an accusatory finger, hopping from subject to subject. Yet in many ways both have to hop around, simply to get a clearer bead on everything these characters seek to withhold from public view. Writer Yūji Sakamoto won the Best Screenplay prize at last year's Cannes for one of the strongest pieces of writing yet attached to a Kore-eda project, a script constantly attempting to pin down people prone to games of hide and seek. It also factors into Kore-eda's most Renoir-like undertaking, ascribing to everyone their reasons, and then doing its level best to dramatise them fairly and unsentimentally; this it does via three successive passes of the same points of conflict, gradually revealing the full extent of this story - and of its makers' concerns. The most readily apparent truth here is that all these characters become more complex as the film proceeds; the loss of innocence it describes in passing is really the gaining of an awareness that there are other points of view, that not everybody sees things the same way. Take the teacher who occupies the film's centre stretch, for one: initially presented as a strong candidate for monster status, shielded by stonewalling staff-room superiors, he comes slowly into focus as an impulsive young man - barely older than his charges - who gets pressurised into making a regrettable mistake, and then sees his life starting to fall apart. Kore-eda hopped around geographically for his last two films, possibly to capitalise on growing international recognition, possibly to prevent from repeating himself. (As ever, multiple truths are in play.) Yet it turns out all he really needed for a fresh start was an internal shift, a change in the way he thinks through his narratives. Monster isn't just a film about children (thus "in the Kore-eda style"), but a film about the rather more fraught and dramatically loaded subject of child protection; if it feels like an advance, that's partly because it's tied thematically to the often haphazard ways we develop.

At any rate, Kore-eda attains this narrative fullness and richness of characterisation with no visible strain whatsoever; the clunkiness of The Truth suddenly seems a very long time ago. He's always been a skilled director of children, able to reveal personality as well as nascent understanding, and it's highlighted again here in the script's third pass at these events - a more conventionally Kore-edan movement observing the growing friendship between two very different kids, one (Kurokawa) sullen and closed-off, the other (Hinata Hiiragi) more open to the elements. Each of these characters is linked to the others by subtly recurring motifs: fire, lost shoes, the threat of plunges from great heights. (Everyone seems to be headed for a fall at some point.) And the quietude that in earlier Kore-eda endeavours felt like the signature of a dreamer with a boner for Ozu and only so much to say for himself now seems very specifically directed in to help us reflect on the events we're seeing and revisiting, and connect one set of life experiences to another. We're helped by energised sound work: noises off - a clatter here, a French horn's parp there - which eventually marry up. Yet even when the narrative logistics - who's doing what to whom where - are hazy, the film's emotional throughline remains wholly graspable, clarified yet further by Ryuichi Sakamoto's final score. The whole is not unlike 2022's much-loved Belgian fable Close, as remade by a 60-year-old rather than a callow film student: we get three passes, yes, but we also sense we could review this story from the perspective of just about anyone on screen, even the day players, and uncover something revelatory about the human condition. Kore-eda has worked so consistently for so long that he can seem a relatively minor figure himself, part of the festival-circuit furniture: a workmanlike director whose cosily middlebrow crowdpleasers facilitate easy consensus and thus win prizes when more ambitious titles have proven divisive. But Monster is major: much as his young leads construct a new universe for themselves in the shell of a rusting schoolbus, Kore-eda finds the whole world, and its unceasing potential for both heartbreak and good, in the course of parsing a sad and sombre little anecdote.

Monster is now playing in selected cinemas.