🇯🇵 🎭 Drama/💥 Thriller 🏆 2023 🌴 Cannes Best Screenplay

"I can't tell anyone, so I lie, ‘cause they'll know I can never be happy." "In that case, whatever you can't tell anyone, blow it away."

Monster is a complicated formal puzzle. It’s also a touching film about childhood, and it’s remarkable that something this intentionally clever manages to work so well emotionally. It starts like a jigsaw puzzle and ends like Call Me by Your Name. And it gets some details about childhood correct in a way that I haven’t seen since “The Innocents”.

"Will the universe break?" "Yeah, time will go backwards. It will turn back, so clocks, people, trains and cats will all move backwards. Beef on rice will turn back into cows, and poop goes back into your butt." "Really?" "Humans will turn into monkeys, the dinosaurs will come back, and we'll go back to before the universe was born." "So we're going to be reborn?" "That's right." "Shall we get ready?"

At the beginning, Monster seems like a normal film, but quickly the viewer will discover that it is divided into sections that overlap chronologically but also form sort of a ring structure of facticity, where each segment confirms or changes a set of out-of-place or unexplained features in the previous sections and simultaneously foreshadow future ones.

One scene may resolve a detail several sections earlier and clarify another that it immediately follows, making the viewer track oddities while setting up two different narrative trajectories based on chronology and sequence. One could easily diagram this, noting out of place details that require explanation and that seem disproportionately relevant: a lighter in one scene, a missing shoe in the next, two similar random burn marks, a fish with swim bladder disease, a science experiment in a mug, a strange comment that has been repeated by multiple people with no clarity on how it spread—these are the sorts of details that are inexplicable in each scene that the other scenes start to explain. Some of the simplest moments and conversations, taken in the context the other scenes provide, become shockingly moving.

The linear narrative time has some cliffhanger-type endings that will puzzle you, but the subtler story is how every event is recontextualized by the viewer while trying to understand what in the world the plot is about and what is happening here. Images and locations recur to demarcate time as well as meaning, and their actual significance may or may not ever be addressed in future segments outside of indexing chronology.

It's a very modern formal approach that could be extremely dry, but it’s not. Somehow, this is a beautiful film about childhood friendship. And that is the oddity that I think, if I had been at Cannes, would have made me vote for this for best screenplay, which it won.

The apparent subject of the film shifts from one repeat of linear time to the next as more is revealed, but at every moment the character actions have emotional resonance. A conversation about reincarnation may mean one thing or elicit one set of feelings at the beginning and an entirely different thing at the end, but they are always enough as they are without requiring effort from the viewer. If you turned off your brain and missed the puzzle entirely, this would still work emotionally.

What emerges, in the end, is a tale that is very honest about childhood and that respects the ability of children to bring meaning to mortality, loss, affection, friendship, integrity and honesty—the characters here are correctly rational for children of their age. And they live a childhood that has a lighthearted freedom, viewed in the second half, that is rather unexpected given what we watch in the first.

As the film progresses and loops to different perspectives, somehow suddenly we are in a summer idyll with an abandoned railcar and the sort of childhood freedom that I remember having that I worry could never be possible for children growing up today. That section reminded me so much of experiences I had, and the most important friendship in the film is straight out of life. In some ways I’ve lived this part of the film, and it’s magic to pull that off with this screenplay.

By the end, the puzzle element nearly falls away, or rather, it becomes intuitively trackable and there is half an hour of wonderful scenes that are more meaningful than I could have expected. But, for a film that starts with its children reflecting on reincarnation and mortality, I suppose, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

The title appears frequently and seemingly randomly throughout, and I haven’t quite worked out a final impression of what it represents. I’m still puzzling over details that seem important that, if clarified, I missed. I don’t know how much of the uncertainty is intentional lack of clarity, translation issues with the subtitles, or my forgetting details. Some major questions just never seem answered, and perhaps they don’t matter.

This isn’t a one-watch film. I enjoyed it, and I thought that it was also boring, and then suddenly all the details started falling into place and from then on out I found it fascinating and emotionally moving. It was pleasant enough that I would rather watch it again and see how my reaction to and understanding of early scenes changes than depend on online summaries to answer these questions for me.

Is this a thriller? For me, not really, unless your idea of thrilling is wondering why a child left their bike by a dirt path in a rainstorm or wondering why someone gasped looking out a window. This is a character drama with a complex chronology and narrative structure peppered with moments of real tension and physical and emotional peril. For this reason, I hesitate to recommend this to all readers, because there is about 90 minutes of quiet character work and delicate but fascinating plot threads that are well written and acted and beautifully filmed. Monster is worth your time, but it’s a quiet film, so make sure that’s the mood you’re in.

If this sounds good, or if you had a free-range summery childhood that let you experience actual freedom and risk, I think there’s a good chance the last third of this film will be very moving to you, so give it a watch and see.

Worst case, Monster should be awarded Best Improv Wildlife Cremation Scene of 2023. I suppose Best Screenplay will have to do. And it won another award that is more important than everything I just wrote, but it’s a huge spoiler to mention, so watch this first, and you’ll understand later why I’ve been vague.

Recommended contingent on taste.

Some Lists:

🎭 Drama | 💥 Thriller
🌴 Cannes 2023 Ranked
🏆 2023 and 2020s Ranked
💎 Slightly Hidden Horror Gems and 🌱 Candidates
📽️ Viewing Next 🗂️ Index of Lists

Looking for something different? Consider:

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person | Anatomy of a Fall | Oppenheimer | Red Rooms | The Lighthouse | Beyond Utopia |Four Daughters | Naga | When Evil Lurks | Eileen | How to Have Sex | Journey to the West | Saltburn | 20 Days in Mariupol | The Holdovers | Leave the World Behind | May December | Dream Scenario | In My Mother's Skin | Tin and Tina