Short Thoughts on Japanese Filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda
Regularly, we’re bombarded by challenges; trials we long to be liberated from, and in the face of these obstacles, we seek many an avenue to mine remedial bliss. Cinema routinely serves as a channel for temporary withdrawal—a haven to mask about and drift away to a site of personal calling. It’s our mode of escape.
Humanist filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda, equipped with a tactful eye for family dynamics, explores this longing for escape. Though in his introspective frame, escape is an illusory relay. His characters must tread the path they’re given, no matter how harsh. To watch a Koreeda film is to be granted the chance to deepen our tethers to the lives of others—the shoulders we brush by in the daily blur of turnpike traffic.
Rather than skim through a keychain of his films in hearty soliloquies, I’d like to discuss one of his latest works, Monster (2023). The premise centers on a boy having trouble in school, acting out of character, which concerns his mother, who, in response, convenes with his teacher to find out what's stirring within him. Emboldened from the jump by a subtle piano-led score that’s teetering, brittle, softly hypnotic, and ever-present in the back of your mind.
It’s tough to say it’s Koreeda’s darkest film, but it exudes a tenor that could be considered the most brooding of his filmography. It seems as if Koreeda wants the viewer to feel they can easily deduce the film's thematic stitching. You can sense the beats and ebbs of the narrative, the characters' aims, intents, their insecurities, their emotional tics, and the advantageous conferences on the horizon, to an almost stereotypical extent.
He wants you to assume, read through their diaphragms, administer your preconceptions, and reel in your second natured, decontextualizing subconscious. He wants to throw even the most intellectually traveled for a loop with a carefully structured summit where you’ll stumble off a cliff, feeling cheated. Only then to be guided—by wingsuit, gradually accelerating—into a lukewarm lake. Upon which one may find themselves floating, back down, mellowed, content with boredom and severe stress; if solely for a spell, while the story’s herbal tea-like wisdom flows untraceably—emerging later as a punctual ripple to the temple during a tide of doubt. The seasonal shallows of doom and gloom, we all encounter, through some transaction or another, and negotiate past to stay vertical for tomorrow's demons that often preview in the half-hour of civil dusk—a time when many of us are free to meditate.
Through Monster, Koreeda arranges a deceptively earned suite of overlapping vignettes where you, the viewer, are both ground zero—the boots moving the needle, on familiar soles—and unbeknownst, the lazy juror glimpsing through a rear window, co-separatist in the erosion of the truth. Mr. Koreeda is the witness who settles the room—a hands-off arbiter, mediating only when sights remain stubbornly blind or feign obstruction, and reality is seething to bust the hell out of silence.