Monster (2023)
M18 film but the characters are in elementary school... only in Singapore.
Full summary of Monster below, based on my memories of watching it at a cinema. Spoiler alert!
The movie has three acts. Each time you think you know who the villain is, it’s undermined in the next act. By the end of the film, no one person is fully bad, but neither are they good. It really goes to show that you can’t trust first impressions. All the characters are misunderstood/ maligned in some way, and it feels like as the audience, you are complicit.
In act one, we see the story unfold from the POV of a single mother struggling to understand why her child, Minato, has been acting out and coming home with injuries or dirt in his waterbottle, or hiding in the forest at night. Minato also breaks down and screams incoherently about having the brain of a girl. His mum is convinced that a teacher is physically and verbally abusing Minato in school because he told her that his teacher said he had the brain of a pig, pulled his ear till it bled, twisted his arm, etc. However, the school seems to be protecting this teacher and the principal herself is infuriatingly passive. It’s her against the entire school administration. She fights tirelessly to get the teacher fired but nothing is done to correct the injustice. One day, the teacher snaps and tells her that her son is the one who bullies another student, Yori. She visits Yori’s house and notices a burn mark on his arm. Soon after, she finds a lighter amongst her son’s belongings but does not know what to make of it. She receives a call from school that her son fell down the stairs at school and when she arrives, she hears whispers from the kids that it was the teacher who pushed him. At home, they board up the house to prepare for a typhoon, but the next morning, she wakes up to discover that her son has run off before the storm has died down.
In act two, we get the story from the teacher’s perspective. Turns out, he’s not a bad guy at all. He’s caring, quirky, popular with the kids, and had a girlfriend he is hoping to marry. However, rumours abound that he visited a hostess bar, so when students run into him on the streets, they say that his girlfriend is from the hostess bar. One day, he walks in on Minato throwing his classmates’ bags around in a fit of rage. He was also raised by a single mother, so he thinks he can understand what he is going through. He also walks in on several situations where it appears as if Minato is bullying/ pranking Yori. The teacher feels like the school is trying to turn him into a scapegoat just to appease a difficult parent, who seems to have developed a personal vendetta against him overnight and he doesn’t understand why when he has always spoken kindly to Minato. Because of the lawyer that the mum hired, he is forced to resign. The principal tells him to save the school by taking the blame and saying that he did all the things he’s being accused of, when he did not actually. There’s a lot of bad press, and even his girlfriend moves out.
He spirals and barges into school one day to ask Minato why he threw him under the bus like that. While running away from the teacher, Minato trips and falls. The teacher hears the other students say that it was him who pushed Minato. Despondent, he climbs onto the roof and seems to be contemplating suicide. Eventually, he goes home. He comes across some unmarked assignments, and starts marking the first script on a whim. It’s Yori’s script, and he starts to realise that the first row of the essay spells out their Minato and Yori’s names, side by side. Realisation dawns upon him and he runs over to Minato’s house in the storm, seeking to apologise for not understanding. By then, Minato had run off but his mum is there. They get into a car to drive to the forest to look for them both. They also spot Yori’s father drunk and on the streets. They’re afraid because there was a landslide warning. At the end of the train tracks, they climb through the fallen bramble and end up on top of an abandoned bus with a skylight. They manage to open it, but the children are nowhere to be found.
In act three, we finally get Minato’s POV, and a little bit of the principal’s. This is when all the misunderstandings begin to unravel and we discover that we truly did not know what was going on at all, because the adults themselves were oblivious. The principal’s granddaughter passed away recently because she accidentally got hit by a car that was reversing in the driveway, supposedly driven by her husband. There have been rumours that she was actually the one behind the wheel and her husband took the heat for her so she can continue taking of the school with her reputation intact. She has to deal with all that and the pressure coming from Minato’s mother. Minato, on the other hand, is lowkey being bullied by some of the other kids. They operate in a clique and target Yori most of all, who ignores them and continues about his day unfazed. They call him an alien and mock him for being girlish. Minato is afraid of being the next target, so he also rejects Yori while in the presence of others.
However, he actually enjoys Yori’s company and wants to be friends with him. They start hanging out together after school everyday in secret. Yori brings him to a secret hideout, which is an abandoned bus that was left in the forest beside some defunct train tracks. The inside of that bus is every child’s dream come true. Together, they carve out a little bubble of their own where they do homework, play games, snack, and decorate. They can just be themselves and be with each other. This was when Yori wrote their names in code in his essay. Minato discovers that Yori’s dad, also a single parent, is actually both physically and verbally abusive. Yori’s dad smokes, drinks, and spends all his time at the hostess bar. One day, the whole building goes up in flames from a fire that started inside the hostess bar. Minato runs into Yori playing with a lighter, and asks him if he was the one who set the hostess bar on fire. Yori cryptically replies that alcoholism is bad. Minato confiscates Yori’s lighter to prevent him from committing arson again.
One day, Yori tells Minato that his dad is going to send him away to live with his grandmother. They have an emotional moment that culminates in a hug, their first one, and when Yori pulls away a little, he says Minato’s name. I thought they were going to kiss. However, Minato reacts aggressively and shoves Yori away, says some hurtful things, then run away. At school, when confronted by his haggard teacher, he confesses that he lied but is unable to say why. He falls down the stairs. The principal patches him up, and she offers comfort to him by letting him take his emotions out on a trombone. She says that she was part of an orchestra in her youth, and he can blow away the words that he is unable to say. He said that he doesn’t know how to tell his mum that he can’t ever be happy the way that she wants (married with children). The principal tells him that if happiness is reserved only for some people, then it is not true happiness, and he can be happy too. The next day, he returns to the hideout but Yori isn’t there. He regrets his actions so he runs over to Yori’s place, but Yori and his dad answer at the door. Yori’s dad tells Yori to tell Minato the good news and say goodbye. Yori says that he’s been cured (of his homosexuality, I suppose) and that he is in love with a girl called Ayaka who lives near his grandma’s. The door shuts. Minato stands in the driveway, stunned into silence. After a pause, the door flings open and we see only Yori as he faces Minato. Yori says, “I lied.” Arms reach around him from behind and violently pulls him into the house as the door slams shut again.
Minato goes home and helps his mother board up the house, but he makes a plan to look for Yori the next day before anyone’s awake. Yori’s dad is not in and he discovers Yori in his clothes inside the bathtub, which has water. It is implied that Yori’s dad was punishing him again for being different. As Minato pulls an unconscious Yori out of the bathtub, his tshirt rides up and we can see clusters of burn marks on Yori’s lower back where his dad gave him horrid bruises. They cycle through the storm to their hideout to wait it out, and eventually they realise they’re trapped inside from the landslide and must climb out from underneath. They don’t seem sad to leave it behind even though they spent so much time inside it, decorating it with stickers and hanging figurines of planets. After getting out of the belly of the bus, they climb into the sewers and emerge in the forest covered in mud. Yori asks, “Are we reborn?” and Minato replies, “No, we’re still the same.” However, it is clear that everyone involved has changed, in one way or another.
I don’t know why this film received an M18 rating when there isn’t even a single kiss between the two boys in the film, and the usual trigger words are never mentioned (“gay,” “homosexual,” etc). Their mutual attraction was only implied and never spelt out explicitly. If you wanted, you could see it as a very close friendship between two 10-year olds. These are small children!!! But only adults can watch this film, because children are not allowed to watch other children go through sexuality-related growing pains. Okay. Got it.