"Family," writes American author Don DeLillo in his seminal novel White Noise, "is the cradle of the world's misinformation."
"Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being"; per DeLillo, these are the identifiers of the family unit.
These same traits suffuse the oeuvre of Hirokazu Kore-eda – the Japanese director who, over his three-decade career, has probed the dysfunctions and delights of families in varying states of strife.
DeLillo, in his novel, charts a nuclear clan facing a climate apocalypse, while Kore-eda's latest film Monster deals with the much more prosaic catastrophes of the schoolyard. But the same quandaries resonate: To what lengths might a family go to protect themselves from nebulous threats? What narratives may we invent to justify our actions?
Fittingly, Kore-eda's films are mostly set in and around the home. In his Palme d'Or winner Shoplifters, a dingy dormitory is a makeshift hide-out for a band of small-time crooks bound not by blood, but by survival.
In 2008's Still Walking and 2016's After the Storm, families – estranged, grieving, wounded – reunite under one rooftop, where old tensions tumble to the fore. The houses of both films become boiler rooms, as resentments resurface and illusions shatter. The noise and the heat, once repressed, suddenly detonate.
Monster revolves around a household of just two: a young single mother, Saori (Sakura Andō) and her tween son Minato (Sōya Kurokawa).
Minato, heading into fifth grade, is at an age where alliances are slippery and non-conformity is punished in the playground. The classroom, frequently, is a den of vipers: a never-ending stream of pranks and jeers searching for a victim.
The film opens with a series of omens: a building engulfed in flames, smoke ascending towards the stars, sirens piercing the dark. From their balcony, mother and son survey the scene with the fervour of sports spectators. "Go for it!" Saori squalls, cheering on fire trucks in the distance.
Soon, Minato's own behaviour begins taking on a bizarre sheen. He hacks his hair off in spiky clumps; he's bike-riding into the woods at the dead of night; he returns home one evening missing a sneaker.
Saori's frenetic energy belies her keen eye. She extracts an explanation from Minato – who claims his nervy new teacher Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama) has been physically and verbally abusing him – and before long she's wreaking havoc in the school principal's office.
There, a battle emerges between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Saori seeks justice with a maternal tenacity, only to be met with futile, frustrating formalities: perfunctory bows and mealy-mouthed apologies.
One could easily imagine Monster continuing down this path, tracing an increasingly high-stakes fight against bureaucracy.
But, instead, Kore-eda performs a bait-and-switch. With a flick of the wrist, he tunnels back to the inferno which opened the film – and then again, for a third time – to recount the same events from the perspective of Mr Hori and Minato himself.
Every slice of the triptych undermines the earlier act, unpeeling the mystery and destabilising our understanding of all parties. Who is the victim and who is the so-called monster?
It's a slight change of pace for Kore-eda, whose prowess often lies in his poetry. Kore-eda's films move like liquid: We float from one scene to another as if we are simply dreaming.
Monster, in comparison, reveals the cogs of its own filmmaking. Its time jumps are deliberately jagged, forcing us to interrogate the muck of morality as our own assumptions about each character are proven false again and again.
It's a twisty film, and sometimes it comes across too calculated – though the final third is well worth the preceding tricks.
After so much adult bickering, we glimpse the world from fresh eyes: those of Minato and his classmate, the precocious outcast Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), who remains devastatingly bright-eyed despite the constant torment of his peers.
This last act of Monster brims with pinwheeling glee and Kore-eda's signature warmth, even as the film lurches towards a perilous conclusion. You might wish it lasted longer.
Monster is in cinemas now.