Monster (2023): When the Truth Is Not in the Telling but in the Seeing

Some films come at you with noise. With explosions. With a need to be loud so you do not miss them. But some films arrive quietly. They walk in, sit beside you, and slowly take your hand. Monster is that kind of film. It does not tell you how to feel. It trusts that you already feel deeply. You just need a story that reminds you.

The movie begins with a simple concern. A mother notices a shift in her son. He is withdrawn. He comes home with a wounded heart and silence wrapped around him. His teacher seems to be the reason. That is what she believes. And with that belief, the story begins to take shape. But nothing stays simple in Monster. What we think we know is just the beginning. Because this story is not about a single version of the truth. It is about how the truth changes depending on who is telling it.

Sakura Ando plays Saori, the mother. You might remember her from Shoplifters, where she carried the weight of survival in a world that barely saw her. Here, she does something different but just as powerful. She brings us into the inner world of a mother who is doing her best. Not perfectly. Not heroically. Just honestly. She is trying to love her son through confusion and fear. And you can feel her breaking, even when she looks composed.

Mr Hori, the teacher, is played by Eita Nagayama. His presence in this story is soft and unsure. He is a man caught in a web he did not build but cannot escape. We begin by suspecting him. But as the layers fall away, what we see is not evil. It is misunderstanding. It is misjudgment. It is how quickly the world creates a villain out of someone it barely knows.

But the real soul of Monster lives with the two boys at the center of the story. Minato and Yori. The way they see each other. The way they move through pain and loneliness with more honesty than the adults around them. That is what the story truly reveals. A quiet friendship built on shared sorrow and invisible scars. They do not explain themselves. They just exist in a space that feels fragile and safe.

The film unfolds like a memory you are not ready to revisit. It takes you back to moments where things could have changed if only someone had listened. There is a rooftop scene that will stay with me for a long time. Nothing dramatic happens. Just a boy standing where no child should ever feel they belong. But in that moment, I understood more about the weight children carry than words could ever explain.

Director Hirokazu Koreeda is known for telling stories that do not force themselves on you. From Nobody Knows to Still Walking, he captures people in their quietest, most vulnerable moments. And in Monster, he continues that legacy. He does not offer easy answers. He simply opens the door to empathy.

This film is not about figuring out who is right and who is wrong. It is about what we miss when we stop listening. It is about how our assumptions can hurt more than the truth. It is about children who do not yet have the words to explain their pain, and the adults who fail to see it anyway.

By the end of Monster, I was not asking myself who the monster was. I was asking why it is so easy to turn pain into suspicion. Why we are so quick to explain away things we do not understand. The film does not scream its message. It lets you feel it.

I watched this movie in silence. Not because I was unsure. But because every frame carried something I did not want to interrupt. Monster does not ask you to judge. It asks you to stay. To sit with discomfort. To look again. And maybe that is the point.

Some monsters are not people. Some monsters are the stories we never took time to hear.

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