125 min | PG-13 | November 22, 2023 | Well Go USA
A mother notices her son acting strange. A teacher gets blamed. A friendship hides in plain sight. The truth keeps moving depending on who tells it.
A boy comes home with a missing shoe and a cut on his ear. His mother demands answers from the school. The teacher gives one story. The principal gives another. The boy gives a third. Hirokazu Kore-eda builds the film as three passes over the same handful of days, each one revealing how much the previous version got wrong. The question of who the monster is changes with every retelling, and the film withholds judgment until the boys themselves can speak.
Sakura Ando plays Saori Mugino, a widowed mother whose certainty about protecting her son curdles into something more frightening as her information stays incomplete. Ando makes the maternal fury feel righteous and dangerous at once. Soya Kurokawa plays her son Minato as a boy locked inside a secret he cannot name, flinching from questions he has no language to answer. Hinata Hiiragi plays Yori Hoshikawa, the classmate at the center of it all, with a brightness that the adults keep mistaking for damage. The two boys carry the third act, and they ground the film’s mystery in something tender and specific.
Kore-eda directs from a screenplay by Yuji Sakamoto that splits the timeline into competing accounts. The structure could feel like a gimmick. Instead each repetition recolors a scene already shown, so a glimpse of cruelty in the first telling becomes an act of love in the third. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score, his last, works in spare piano figures that refuse to manipulate, holding back where a lesser film would swell. A recurring image of a flooded tunnel and an abandoned train car gives the boys a private world that the camera treats as sacred rather than symbolic.
This is a film about how adults assemble stories from fragments and then act on them as if they were whole. Every character believes they are protecting a child. Almost none of them understand what the child actually needs. Kore-eda lets the misreadings accumulate without villains, then arrives at a final movement that reframes the entire film as a love story the grown-ups were too distracted to see. The empathy is the structure, and the structure is the point.