“Monster” is a standalone story, but it would be a mistake to not watch any more Hirokazu Kore-eda films. He’s been making movies since 1995 and has over a dozen on his resume. Some of his more recent films include “Shoplifters,” about a found family of vagrants in modern Japan, and “Broker,” a South Korean film (featuring Song Kang-ho of “Parasite”) about black market adoption. In both of these, like “Monster,” Kore-eda focuses on people with sad but ordinary lives, weaving in moments of well-earned and bittersweet emotion you’ll never forget.
As for his influences, the structure of “Monster” is indebted to Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” — a 1950 Jidaigeki (Japanese period drama) about the trial of an accused murderer. Three witnesses, including the accused, give vastly different testimonies about the event that contradict each other. Similar framing devices have been employed in “Hero” (starring Jet Li) and Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel.” The difference is that, in “Monster,” the three sections don’t contradict each other — they simply show the three leads’ perspectives with the limited information they each have, while only the audience puts the whole puzzle together. The triptych structure and queer themes of “Monster” owe just as much to Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” as well.
“Monster” shares its title with another acclaimed piece of Japanese media: Naoki Urasawa’s manga/anime, about a neurosurgeon hunting a former patient turned serial killer. This one is admittedly a bit of a reach, but both “Monster” stories are slowly unraveled mysteries about how a harsh world can shape children for the worse. Both Kore-eda and Urasawa end their stories with a similar message — that calling other people “monsters” serves only to justify evil done to them.