Japan • Drama / Thriller • Year: 2023 • Running time: 127
Languages: Japanese • English
Synopsis:
After Broker, Kore-eda is back to a Japanese language film, using different takes on a single story to tell
the fraught tale of two troubled boys and their parents.
One of the director’s finest, its thematic scope and emotional power growing with each new revelation.
Nick Schager: The Daily Beast
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Shoplifters (2018) / Our Little Sister (2015) / Like Father, Like Son (2013)
Writer: Yûji Sakamoto
Main Cast:
| Sakura Andô | Saori |
| Eita Nagayama | Hori |
| Soya Kurokawa | Minato |
(for full cast list, additional technical information and reviews, please visit the Monster pages in IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes)
Film Notes:
Monster had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, selected to compete for the Palme d’Or. It had a hugely positive critical response: “Gently devastating in its compassion [it is] a masterpiece of shifting perspectives that surprises to the end” was one appraisal. In a discussion with two critics Kore-eda said that he intended the ending to be one in which Minato and Yori choose life, directing it as a celebration of their being alive (after what happens in the tunnel). He said that he had anticipated that “about 20%“ of the audience would interpret it as a depiction of an after-life, which he acknowledged was “undeniably” an underestimation and might have been “naïve”. What will our CFC audience make of it?
So this is a story about the developing relationship between two young boys, one which is misunderstood by the adults who care, and fail to care, for them. They are, in one sense, ‘outsiders’, a theme which Kore-eda has continuously explored in his films: the grief-stricken Yumiko in his 1995 breakthrough Maborosi, the down-on-his-luck private detective Ryota in 2016’s After the Storm or the family of petty thieves in 2008’s Shoplifters.
This is the last film in our 2024/25 season of 10. We hope you have enjoyed all that you have managed to watch. The programme was chosen by our Secretary (Booking) Daden Hunt, with suggestions from other members of the Committee. Daden has now stood down from the Committee after many years of supporting the club and we offer him our very great thanks and wish him well. Another programme is being planned for 2025/26, starting on Monday 29 September.