MONSTER

 

Not like that over-familiar Kurosawa go-to, no, not really, because the story here doesn't shape-shift in the telling and re-telling, just gets slanted at angles, reveals sides to it that were always there, just slightly out of eyeshot, but also profoundly out of reach, given how fortified and calcified the borders of our perspectives tend to be. At first, I thought this was an adaptation of Taiyo Matsumoto's Go Go Monster manga, but they couldn't be more polar as opposites, even if in my head they make sense as the oddest companion pieces. Which is to say that my coming in blind may have been more crucial to my eventual giving over to it and it may be a public service on my part not to talk too much about such boring things as what it's about, except to say that Sakura Ando and the two boys, Soya Kurokawa and Hinata Higari, are presences to behold, and I may be alone in how I read that ending, everybody else seems to think otherwise. It's not lacking for images that grip you and squeeze (the principal's last shot, the muddy window, that culvert at night) but it's really the form the unfurling takes that gives everything dramatic torque and emotional resonance, the soft push and pull of the misdirection, and the way Ryuichi Sakamoto's minimalist and beautiful, yet at some points nearly transcendent, piano figures waft in, atmospheric but also terribly aware, less augmentation, more last piece of the puzzle. Always been a casual Kore-Eda stan, even if his After Life is a desert island film, but this is me crying and gushing.