I recently watched the Japanese film 怪物 (かいぶつ) (Monster). It was both a rewarding and challenging experience. While I absolutely recommend the film, I found the story quite difficult to follow — not only because of the keigo and naturalistic speech, but also because the story itself is intentionally fragmented and confusing. The film’s narrative is told from three different perspectives, and even by the end, not everything is revealed.
I watched without subtitles and with the original Japanese audio. It’s vital to listen closely to every line, as key information is often conveyed in a single sentence — including references to characters who haven’t yet been introduced.
A Story of Misunderstanding and Perspective
The film follows Mugino Saori 麦野早織 (played by the exceptional Andou Sakura / 安藤サクラ), a single mother raising her fifth-grade son, Minato 湊. Early in the film, we learn that a fire has destroyed a nearby building. Around the same time, Minato begins behaving strangely. Saori discovers him cutting his own hair, coming home with one shoe, and eventually disappearing. Saori starts to suspect that his teacher, Mr Hori 保利道敏, is abusing him.
From there, Monster begins what feels like a bait-and-switch: a familiar scenario of a parent confronting a school over alleged misconduct becomes something far more complex. The early scenes are masterfully frustrating, especially for anyone familiar with Japanese social customs. The faculty’s overly ‘sincere’ apologies, circular conversations, and desperate attempts to maintain harmony are exasperating to watch — which, of course, is the point. I found myself yelling at the screen, annoyed by the same polite evasions that I used to encounter when living in Japan.
But what makes these scenes so powerful is how true they feel. The performances are understated and authentic, and the dialogue is formal, indirect, and deliberately obfuscating. This perfectly captures the bureaucratic suffocation of Japanese institutional culture. For language learners, it’s fascinating but brutally difficult: the mix of keigo, evasive phrasing, references to unseen conversations and half-truths makes it a linguistic labyrinth.
Rumours, Lies, and the Elusiveness of Truth
From this setup, the film begins to twist our understanding. One of the opening scenes reveals a rumour that Hori-sensei was seen at the local hostess bar that was recently destroyed by fire. Much later in the film, we learn how this rumour began. A few schoolchildren had livestreamed the fire and recognised him nearby. The gossip quickly snowballs — possibly because livestream viewers noticed his beautiful girlfriend and assumed she must have worked at the club.
It’s one of the film’s early examples of how perception, gossip, and prejudice intertwine to obscure reality. It is certainly one of the main themes of the movie: that what we think we know is often a distortion, shaped by lies, rumours, and our own biases. Not everything is revealed by the film’s end, and for the first half of the movie almost nothing is revealed.
As Saori’s confusion deepens, the film becomes increasingly opaque. We see her frustration with the school’s evasive responses, the bizarre and inconsistent behaviour of the teachers, and the sense that everyone — parents, teachers, even children — is lying or hiding something. Eventually, the story shifts perspectives, retelling earlier scenes from other characters’ points of view, revealing the misunderstandings, miscommunications, and emotional blind spots that created the chaos in the first place.
As the movie progresses, no one seems to be innocent, but also nobody seems to be the monsters they are being made out to be.
Monsters in Many Forms
The brilliance of Monster lies in how it plays with the idea of who — or what — the real “monster” is. At first, it seems to be Hori. Then perhaps Saori’s son, Minato. Later, Minato’s classmate Yori. But as the story unfolds, we realise the “monsters” aren’t just individuals — they’re also the unseen forces that twist people’s perceptions: fear, shame, prejudice, grief, and love.
Even Yori’s father calls his own son a monster. The teachers think the parents are monsters. The children see monsters in adults. At first, the film invites us to believe in those monsters — to see them as real, embodied threats in the form of Hori, or Yori’s abusive father. But as the story unfolds, the boundaries blur. The word itself begins to feel inadequate: monster suggests something external, something safely separate from ourselves. What Monster ultimately exposes are both kinds — the visible cruelties that damage others, and the invisible ones we carry inside. The film’s true monsters are as much psychological as physical: constructs, avatars, the ghosts in the machine that emerge when fear, shame, and misunderstanding take hold.
A Study in Miscommunication
For Japanese learners, this film offers an incredible study in communication — and miscommunication. It’s not an easy watch linguistically. The keigo-laden exchanges between teachers and parents are complex, and because so much of the dialogue revolves around misunderstandings, characters rarely say what they actually mean.
Several times I paused to check with a Japanese native speaker about what was being said, only to hear, “That doesn’t really make sense — they’re referencing something else.” In a way, that confusion mirrors the film itself: meaning is always half-hidden, filtered through context, implication, and misunderstanding.
At times, it was genuinely difficult to keep up, but that confusion mirrors the characters’ own disorientation. The film deliberately withholds information, showing how easily even simple gestures or words can be misread, especially when filtered through emotion, hierarchy, and cultural restraint.
The Japanese language also lends itself to be vague in these ways, as for example there was a scene with Yori talking to Minato about how Yori’s mother was sick, and later on I realised that Yori was the one who was sick (according to his father, anyway).
Performances and Direction
Andou Sakura gives an outstanding performance as Saori; she is fierce, emotional, and painfully human. Nagayama Eita 永山瑛太 captures the quiet despair of a man whose life is being destroyed piece by piece, accelerating helplessly towards doom. It feels like he is an innocent man accused of a murder he didn’t commit, crushed by the machinations of the media and justice system in a Kafkaesque nightmare. The children, especially the young actors playing Minato and Yori, are remarkable; their relationship becomes a powerful centrepiece of the film.
Koreeda Hirokazu’s 是枝裕和 direction is meticulous and understated. The film’s pacing is slow, but its tension builds relentlessly. The cinematography, often drenched in rain or shadow but changing over the course of the film, reflects the different viewpoints as they become the focus of the narrative.
Final Thoughts
By the end, Monster leaves you questioning not only who was right or wrong, but whether such distinctions even matter. It’s a film about perception, prejudice, and the limits of understanding — and how our need for a clear villain or “monster” often blinds us to the truth.
It’s a timely reminder that it is not always so cut and dry; there often aren’t evil characters doing evil things all day, just as there are not legendary heroes who are perfect and righteous at all times.
For anyone studying Japanese, this is not a film to watch for vocabulary practice — it’s too dense, too subtle, and too full of elliptical, emotionally charged dialogue. But if you want a glimpse into the nuances of Japanese communication, the social hierarchies embedded in speech, and the unspoken rules that govern confrontation and apology, Monster is an incredible, if challenging, case study. I certainly will be watching it a few more times to see if I can take in more details.
A beautifully acted, thematically rich, and emotionally devastating film, Monster (2023) is a masterclass in how truth, language, and human connection can diverge in such hauntingly different directions.
