Monster (2023) review

A narrative told from three perspectives (with a nod to Kurosawa): for the first part, widowed single mother Saori (Sakura Andō) struggles to handle her temperamental son Minato (Sōya Kurokawa), in the second, schoolteacher Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama) faces trouble from the administration for being abusive towards his students and in the last section, Minato and his precocious classmate Yori (Hinata Hiiragi) form a strong bond and spend time hanging around a broken-down train, which they convert into their own little world.  Kore-eda once again shows the most remarkable empathy when working with children (not the easiest thing to do, I assure you), but the structure of the movie is needlessly overcomplicated, perhaps to cover up the fact that it's a rather simple tale about two boys who are "different" and struggling to come to terms with that (while harboring deep concerns that they're "monsters").  I don't like to compare movies often, but Lukas Dhont's Close covered this topic in a much more poetic and unforgettable manner, without the dramatic excess (jumping out of a moving car, an attempted suicide, a hostess bar set ablaze, a hurricane followed by a mudslide).  But the real nugget of wisdom for all would-be teachers comes from the traumatized school principal (Yūko Tanaka), who busies herself by scraping gunk off the floors (as a kind of self-punishment): "What actually happened doesn't matter."