“There seems to be no other monster than the labyrinth itself.”
– Jacques Lacan

In an interview with the film critic Mark Schilling, Kore-eda Hirokazu spoke of something that continuously preoccupies him as a director. It is a question concerned with form: “what a film should be.”1 His own response to this question settles on a particular mode of cinematic looking: “I am trying to make films looking at the people in front of me, at the emotions in front of me, without preconceptions.” Further still, Kore-eda looks “more at the overall film, again without preconceptions.” The circular use of “without preconceptions,” describing both phenomenal immediacy and structural awareness, conveys a sense of thusness and meditative openness. Kore-eda’s most recent film, Kaibutsu (Monster, 2023), displays above all, in my reading, the artistry of form. I argue that Kore-eda’s form recalls the making of mandalas used in Buddhism as an aid to perceive the hallucinatory nature of relative truths. What abides is the perceiving mind, or cinematic introspection. Indeed, Monster consists of an intricate architecture (the overall film) relating three conflictive versions of realities (what is in front of the eye), which are invariably acute with emotional immediacy. Even though Monster seems to affirm its third version of reality, it is haunted by a momentum of repetition and interplay, a conflation of epistemology and ontology, and a confusion of eyes and mind. Wandering in these labyrinths of worlds, the audience is confronted with the aporia of cinematic identification and the monster of subject unformation. This circuitous process of perception as a whole cultivates cinematic introspection, akin to what Victor Fan described as “the insight-image” in cinema and Buddhism, which provokes deep contemplation on the nature of reality.2

“What Actually Happened Does Not Matter”

Monster spins a story three times. Each variant of the story is symmetrically bookended with the spectacle of a building on fire and the arrival of a typhoon. The camera returns each time to the site and duration but with new angles and tones, de-establishing the previous form of what happened. The first version of the story is narrated from the perspective of a single mother, Saori (Andō Sakura), who notices the incrementally strange behaviours of her son and senses a deep crisis and impending tragedy. Enframed through the eyes of the panic-stricken mother, the 11-year-old Minato (Kurokawa Soya) may be a victim of a certain monstrous abuse at school: he is obsessed with the bewilderingly existential question of whether his brain has been switched with a pig’s brain; he comes home with only one shoe; chunks of his cut-out hair are scattered in the bathroom; his ear is injured; he roams underneath a dilapidated drainage tunnel alone at night reciting “who is the monster”; he jumps out of his mother’s moving car and asks her not to feel sad for him. After much questioning, Minato and his friend Yori (Hiiragi Hinata), the child of a single father, confirm that their teacher, Mr. Hori (Nagayama Eita), has been abusing Minato at school. Yet the mother’s confrontation with the school only leads to an eerie impasse: while the school principal remains chillingly inscrutable in her deadpan face and empty apologies, Mr. Saori claims that Minato is a bully who abuses Yori. This sense of uncertainty is heightened when the mother finds a lighter in Minato’s bedroom. 

The second version unfolds as an antithetical story, undermining any former conclusions the viewer might have drawn. Through the perspective of the teacher, Mr. Hori, the viewer now sees/conjectures Minato’s aggressive behaviours towards his smaller classmate, Yori, and his possible role in the death of a stray cat. Concerned about Yori’s well-being, Mr. Hori visits his home and is left wordless when Yori’s father states that his son is a monster with a pig’s brain and needs to be turned back into a human being. Mr. Hori’s career and personal life are ruined by the false accusation and news report of him being a physically and psychologically abusive teacher. On the brink of jumping off the school building, Mr. Hori is suddenly surrounded by an eruption of sound: two brass horns issue a series of discordant notes that drone in unison. Lacking musicality, the two instruments sound like drawn-out calls from mournful animals (monsters) connected in their pain and sorrow. The same sound had appeared in the first variant of the story, when the mother feared that Minato had jumped from the school building. The sound’s source in that moment is unclear—it’s difficult to tell whether it’s diegetic, emanating from the action on screen, or part of the film’s score intended to heighten the emotional atmosphere. The viewer only finally learns, in the third narration, that the horns are, in fact, diegetic, originating from Minato and the principal. 

Monster

When the fire rages for the third time, the viewer follows Minato and enters a tender and tumultuous world of deep friendship and unstated love between Minato and Yori. In a poignant scene when the principal teaches Minato how to play the horn, Minato confides in her that he lied about Mr. Hori because he likes someone but could not anyone. The principal, who has been perceived as emotionally hollow and inarticulate, assures Minato that it is not true happiness if only some people can have it and invites the boy to use the horn to blow away the unsayable. Together, they play, the sound transferring to the other two frames. Monster does not quite conclude with the third version of the story. The dreamlike quality of the final scenes, where Minato and Yori run exuberantly in the sunlit nature, is contradicted by the interweaving of scenes set in violent winds and heavy rain: Saori and Mr. Hori’s failed attempt to locate the children, the collapse of Yori’s father in the full force of the typhoon, and the principal’s melancholic gaze at the flowing river. The viewer is once again left in a state of liminality, uncertain whether Minato and Yori survived or perished.

To echo the principal’s words, “What actually happened does not matter,” the kernel of Monster does not revolve around abuse, queerness, or even the abstract theme of the subjective nature of truth.3 As a whole, the film is more a cinematic figure of thought than a convoluted form of an optical realism. What matters is the totality of a labyrinthine process itself and the mind ground that conjures it. Each variant is a site of mental and emotional attunement; each site undoes another, and the tension remains unresolved. The viewer participates in and becomes aware of this fluid realm of creative deception. This awareness, in both Buddhist and psychoanalytical thinking, pries open the unreality of the visible (symbolic) world. The ever-shifting monster, in this sense, is not an external character or force within the narrative, but that which reveals the illusion and impermanence of the (cinematic) world, a mirror through which we come to perceive and support a unified self.   

The Mandala

In his new introduction to Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Schrader (2018) discusses three directions of cinema when it “broke free from the iron nucleus of narrative.”4 The third direction, which he terms “the mandala”, describes the inner workings of meditative cinema: “It is the candle, the rock garden, the flower arrangement. It is the mandala. One can meditate upon a mandala for hours on end. There’s nothing more a movie can offer.”5 Shrader’s invocation of the mandala accentuates the mental landscape of immersion and insight, fundamental to the art of cinema. He largely portrays the mandala to be a static and silent art form that fosters mindfulness, highlighting key words such as waiting, duration, inaction, stillness, and trance.6 This view, however, overlooks the participatory role of the meditator who creates the mandala, and diminishes the intricate layers of its construction. Indeed, the making of the mandala by the Buddhist monks is a vivid and processual ritual that reflects the interdependent arising of movement and stillness, interiority and externality. It is through this dialectical image of the mandala that I have foregrounded my thinking of Monster: the making and unmaking of an intricate and colourful pattern; the mind as inherent in the form of the world; the correlation between perception and ontology; or simply the idea that it is we who have dreamt up the world with emotions, projections, sufferings, and attachments. 

In its three-dimensional construct, along with the circle of cosmic elements – evident in either the wheel-like structure of the burning building and storm, or the small scene of burying the dead cat in the earth, burning the covering tree leaves on the animal body, and then extinguishing the fire with water – Monster can be interpreted as a mandala diagram, akin to that used in Vajrayana Buddhism as an aid to meditation and a path to transformation and realisation. Not unlike the monks who create colourful sand mandalas, only to dissolve them upon completion, we too create intricate cinematic worlds, ephemeral and illusory by nature. Different from the Chan (Zen) rock gardens or the flower arrangements that are stable and fixed objects of meditation, the deliberately constructed world of Monster, with its dizzying symmetries and variations, is the mind. In other words, its durational ontology is its epistemology. The film interrogates the nature of reality as simultaneously exterior and interior, where what is seen and known folds back upon itself. This interplay is illustrated in two curious moments from the first narrative variation. Consider the scene where Minato’s mother leaves for groceries. Minato is shown leaning over to pick up an eraser from the floor. Upon her return, he is still – or again – in the same position, reaching for the eraser. This framing presents another instance of the son’s strangeness, unsettling the viewer and intensifying the aura of mystery around him. Identifying with the mother, the viewer is structurally blind to the possibility that the eraser might have simply fallen a second time. In another moment, the mother observes the principal in a grocery store. This vision culminates in her witnessing an obscure woman committing a malicious act: purposefully tripping a young girl. Here, the viewer is drawn deeply into the mother’s perspective, characterised by antipathy and the uncanny, leaving out the question of intent or accident. These small scenes, when contemplated afar from the whole of the film, may show that what appears strange may be banal, and what is sinister may be imagined. 

In truth, Kore-eda’s films, extending back to After Life (1998), have always been acutely attuned to cinema’s unique capacity to play with fact and fiction, memory and imagination, the actual and the possible, the real and the unreal. His art might be read as a sustained meditation on the possibility of a reality continuously generated and transformed by the filter of the mind. In his scholarship, Victor Fan has explored how Buddhist philosophy can deepen our understanding of cinematic identification and interrogate whether the nature of identification is an intersubjective process or an idealistic process. Alluding to the famous four-line verse from the Dimond Sutra on phenomenology, he maintains that “the cinematic image and our process of identification operate in a way similar to a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, a dew drop, and a flash of lightning.”7 Cinematic identification, in this sense, transcends the notion of a fixed, psychoanalytical subject who submits to the fate of either aligning with an idealised character or perceiving in horror the lack in the Other. Instead, like the making of the mandalas, it becomes an introspective and transient process – one that foregrounds the awareness of this very flux. In other words, cinematic identification is not about becoming someone in a stable, identificatory sense, but about observing the vicissitudes of phenomenal experience that is impermanent, aware of its own ephemerality. The dreamer is dreaming a lucid dream.

Loss

From the standpoint of ontology, Monster reflects the impermanence of life and engages with the more abstract problem of representing loss in variant specificities, a problem that has long concerned Kore-eda as a director.8 What happened does not matter, as loss flows as a universal condition enveloping and connecting all characters (rather than dividing them), whether it is: the principal who caused the death of her granddaughter in an accident; Mr. Hori who grew up with a single mother and wrote about being reborn in his childhood essay; Yori whose life is scarred by a violent father and maternal absence; or Minato who empathizes with his mother’s struggles and whose childhood dream is to become a single mother. This section will attend to a strong undercurrent of narrative energy amidst the flux of loss. 

In a certain sense, Saori is the reincarnation of Yumiko from Maborosi (1995), a single mother who raises her infant in the wake of the inexplicable suicide of her husband.9 Monster performs a similar manoeuvre, illuminating a delicate balance between the gaping and ineffable loss and the daily and almost banal mode of living with it. This aura of loss is magnified in Saori’s mounting fear of Minato’s potential self-destruction, which carries the weight of repetition. The anxiety Saori experiences is more than a fear of an external unfolding but a confrontation with the trauma of her husband’s death. There is much elliptical narration and profound ambiguity surrounding the absent husband. In one scene, Minato and his mother celebrate the father’s birthday, engaging in a playful, almost childlike conversation about whether the father has been reborn as a stinky bug, a giraffe, or a horse. The causal absurdity of their speculation manifests a deeper grief and a mundane ritual of remembrance through which they confront the pain and mystery of life. Saori urges Minato to confide all of his troubles in his father – only in a later variation of the scene does the viewer hear Minato’s words: “Why did you bring me into this world?” A mournful address to the father, the question hovers between life and death in stillness. Before the arrival of the typhoon, Minato wakes in tears having dreamt of his father. He relays the words of the deceased to Saori, telling her that he loves her and thanking her for all she has done. Minato then asks his mother what he will be reborn as, a question that conflates father and son, blurring the line between the living and the dead. This aching moment echoes Minato’s earlier expression of fear about becoming like his father. The third version of the story discloses, through a seemingly fortuitous conversation between Minato and Yori, that Minato’s father died in a car accident while on a trip with a woman in a ‘skimpy’ skirt. This trivial detail, in its bluntness and suggestiveness, gives a glimpse into the tangled emotional terrain of desire, loss, grief, and guilt that continues to haunt the family. The complexity of the emotional landscape is externalised visually in the portrayal of Saori’s household. The space is not static but pulses – lived-in, untidy, layered, meandering – where the creaks of the floor and the cluttered atmosphere form an assemblage of warmth, connection, emotional fatigue, and the ghostly traces of familial history. The house is neither a mere backdrop nor a neutral container: it is a temporal labyrinth where the anachronistic things persist (such as the curious presence of Christmas decorations). The subtle disarray of the space, in its tension with time, becomes a plane of immanence, where history, memory, loss, and emotional experience blur into an affective whole.

Conclusion: The Lake 

Amidst the fire and the storm of human events, there are mysterious shots of a mirror-like, luminous lake conveying a sense of tranquillity and perhaps even transcendence.10 The lake, in its prolonged stillness, appears twice with a glowing and ethereal quality. In my reading, it serves as a visual metaphor for the mind’s ground. It is untouched, outside the volition of the characters, and supports the unfolding of the narrative. 

Monster

Monster

The initial shot of the lake follows an emotionally charged confrontation between Saori and the principal, in which Saori presses the question of whether the principal led to the accidental death of her granddaughter. She draws a stark parallel for the silent old woman, asserting that the grief the principal must have felt is the grief she is now enduring over her own son. The sudden appearance of the serene and reflective surface of the water momentarily transcends the emotional turbulence. Its soft lighting and expansive composition evoke a meditative pause amidst the narrative conflict and perhaps suggest the possibility of reconciliation, acceptance, connection or renewal. Curiously, a raft, or a floating platform, is visible near the right side of the frame, small and yet clear. Objects resembling bowls and wine vessels are placed on it, symbolising spiritual offerings and evoking themes of grief and loss. The raft, which is outside of the diegesis, thematically resonates with the paper boat made by the principal commemorating her granddaughter and the altar for the deceased father within Minato’s household. The raft here rests effortlessly on the calm water which extends outward to meet the mountains and the sky. The second shot of the lake appears after Mr. Hori’s girlfriend leaves him after his life has been torn apart. Compared to the first shot, this image offers a more expansive and panoramic view. The near absence of the shoreline creates a sense of detachment. The raft and the objects on it are now further from sight, positioned at the centre of the frame. The vast emptiness around it, the blurred boundary between the water and the sky, the wide-angle openness, and the horizontal framing, all invite the viewer to rest in the moment’s stillness and introspection. 

Yiju Huang is associate professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Fordham University. She writes about Chinese literature and film, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism. Her writing can be found in PrismNeoheliconMCLC, and Comparative Literature Studies. She is the author of Tapestry of Light: Aesthetic Afterlives of the Cultural Revolution (Brill, 2014).

Endnotes

  1. Mark Schilling and Kore-eda Hirokazu, “Kore-eda Hirokazu Interview,” Film Criticism (Special Double Issue: Kore-eda Hirokazu), XXXV, nos. 2–3 (Winter/Spring 2011): 11-20, 11.
  2. Victor Fan, Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2022), pp. 113-156.
  3. For an insightful study on Kore-eda’s attention to the interplay of fact and fiction, see Lars-Martin Sørensen, “Reality’s Poetry: Kore-eda Hirokazu Between Fact and Fiction,” Film Criticism (Special Double Issue: Kore-eda Hirokazu), XXXV, nos. 2–3 (Winter/Spring 2011): 21-36.
  4. Ibid., 25.
  5. Ibid., 31.
  6. Ibid., 30.
  7. Victor Fan, “Illuminating Reality: Cinematic Identification Revisited in the Eyes of Buddhist Philosophies” in The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions, Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax, eds., Daniel Fairfax, trans. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), p. 254.
  8. For a specific exploration of the intersection of loss, memory, and the transcendent in Kore-eda’s work, see David Desser, “After Life: History, Memory, Trauma and the Transcendent,” Film Criticism (Special Double Issue: Kore-eda Hirokazu), XXXV, nos. 2-3 (Winter/Spring 2011): 46-65.
  9. As discussed in “Tracking the Transcendental: Kore’eda Hirokazu’s Maboroshi,” Yumiko, a young widow and single mother, grapples with the sudden, unexplained suicide of her husband, and her journey intertwines mourning with existential and spiritual dimensions. Christine L. Marran, Film History, XIV, no. 2 (2002): 166-169.
  10. For an in-depth exploration of cinematic use and representation of water in the Kore-eda’s films, see Linda C. Ehrlich, “Kore-eda’s Ocean,” Film Criticism (Special Double Issue: Kore-eda Hirokazu), XXXV, nos. 2–3 (Winter/Spring 2011): 127-146. For a study of the connection between Kore-eda’s films and natural elements of earth, water, fire, air, and metal, see her book:  Linda C. Ehrlich, The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

About The Author

Yiju Huang is associate professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Fordham University. She writes about Chinese literature and film, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism. Her writing can be found in Prism, Neohelicon, MCLC, and Comparative Literature Studies. She is the author of Tapestry of Light: Aesthetic Afterlives of the Cultural Revolution (Brill, 2014).

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