Monster: A Japanese Film about how context matters

The other day I was at a sleepover and we decided to watch a movie called Monster. It's a Japanese film and it is pretty hard to explain without spoiling it, but it starts off about a mother who thinks her son is being bullied by a teacher at school. In this post I won't explain the movie because I just want to get my thoughts out about it, so please go watch the movie before reading it (we watched it on Amazon Prime).

The movie was a very interesting experience for me. You will see, as you watch it, more questions pop up than answers, but those questions eventually get answered the move point of views you go through. Except for the one question at the end of the movie: did the boys survive? 

I am a very hopeful person, despite how realistic I am, and I assumed they had survived and taken a different path or simply just ran away. The clues we have to support this are the open window at the bottom of the train as well as the train tunnel that the boys walked through after escaping. The director intended it to be more of a symbolic paradise that they escaped to rather than an actual ending, which I also appreciate, but it doesn’t satisfy my cravings to know what happened. 

Other than the ending, the characterization of Minato, who the story is mainly about, is my favorite part. We see him go from a seemingly bullied kid to a kid who is struggling to accept himself fully. It’s only until the ending when he escapes with Yori that he fully embraces that he may not be who everyone thought he was and he’s ok with that. And Yori himself is so adorable and full of happiness despite being bullied by his classmates and his father abusing him for being into boys. 

I also feel bad for the teacher because he was really trying to protect Yori from being bullied, even though it was the wrong way, because he assumed it was Minato doing the bullying.

In fact, the whole movie would have never happened if there was just simple communication going on. If Minato had told his mother, who was very worried about him, that his teacher wasn’t abusing him and that he had a crush on a boy in his class then maybe she wouldn’t have gotten the teacher fired and accidentally ruin his life. And if the teacher just told the mother that the nosebleed was on accident and if he just talked to Minato and Yori about what was going on both at home and with each other, maybe they wouldn’t have needed to run away. Minato’s mother even noticed that Yori was abused but she didn’t really do anything (not that she could) but that ultimately ended up in the boys wanting to run away from their current lives. 

Overall, I think this movie was beautifully crafted and directed because it really shows you that you never know what’s going on in someone’s life. There’s so much context that comes with a single person and there are many reasons why someone will do the things that they do. It’s the environment that we are forced to grow up in that shapes who we are and the decisions we make.

I started writing this in April after I first watched the movie but I think this is the perfect time to finally post this because it’s June!

Happy Pride month to all my readers whose MBTI is LGBT  🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

K.L.