Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Monster" is destined to be compared to "Rashomon", and even Fukushige himself, who invited "Monster" to be shortlisted for Cannes, compared the two films.
Monster (2023) It is true that both "Monster" and "Rashomon" use the same segmented structure, both have an unreachable truth as the core, and both are made by Japanese directors. However, the movie closest to the temperament of "Monster" is not "Rashomon", but "Crash", which has a mixed reputation for Paul Haggis. 
The core plot of "Rashomon" is not complicated, it is just a story of two men and a woman, and it is the different positions that distort the narrative of the parties involved, which makes the otherwise simple truth confusing. In this sense, "Monster" is actually the opposite of "Rashomon", which looks similar, but the actual distance is the farthest. There are no different versions of the truth in Monsters, only the fragmented narratives of parents and teachers about the same truth. 
In Rashomon, the truth depends on what kind of narrative the viewer prefers to believe;In "Monster," the truth depends on how willing the audience is to accept someone else's narrative. The film relies so heavily on clever narrative that it becomes boring after being spoiled. In the end, Yuji Sakagaki's dazzling tricks escaped the Cannes jury, just as Paul Haggis escaped from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. 
One of the most criticized aspects of "Crash" is that it sets up a highly acute social issue, but it is held high and gently put down. The racially discriminatory white cops are good people, the discriminated black people are also good people, everyone is essentially human and makes mistakes that some people make, Oscar burst into tears, and Haggis moved America. Racial tensions and systemic injustices have been reduced to individual issues and moral dilemmas, which are the most common tactics used by conservative mainstream culture to deal with controversial issues, and cinema as a mass medium has always welcomed the narrative strategy of the finale. 
At the end of Crash (2004) Monster, the scene of Katsu and Irie running through the endless green fields is hard not to recall the convoy of immigrants heading for California in the final shot of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath. 
The screen is a space of escape, and John Steinbeck's social documentary of the Great Depression has been transformed into an American theme of promoting family values and finding the American dream, which the film industry has made clear at least a hundred years ago. 
The Grapes of Anger (1940) If Protestantism and Capitalism is the background color of the American theme, then the "Human Completion" that breaks the wall of the heart is the background color of the Japanese theme. The single mother Saori and the rookie teacher Paulie in "Monster" are both the main subjects of the narrative in their respective chapters, but their understanding of the truth is incomplete, and they also regard each other as monsters because of the limitations of their perspectives. Of course, the difficulty of mutual understanding between people is the eternal theme of Japanese dramas and Japanese films, but there are also differences in the treatment of the same theme in different works. In "Monster", the mother cares for her son, and the teacher does her best, obviously it is a misunderstanding that can be eliminated in a few words, but the contradiction between the two has intensified to an inexplicable extent, then it can only be because the villain is a hindrance, and the role list looks at it, and the principal must and can only play the villain. 
I have to say that the scene where the school management level bows to the hayori collective and apologizes expressionlessly is the most beautiful scene of "Monster", which is full of drama, but the exaggerated banter is often to cover up the weakness of the screenwriter. The principal kept saying that the facts are not important, everything is to protect the school, then it is time to see clearly that the school and Poly are prosperous and humiliated, and let Poly admit that what he has not done is not to find trouble for the school in the final analysisWhat's more, on the one hand, I am afraid of being punished by the Education Bureau, and on the other hand, I have to launch a development conference with great fanfare - they have already seen the newspaper, don't the people from the Education Bureau read the newspaper?The principal's brain circuit is strange, it can only be described as psychological **, sure enough, the second half of the film tells the audience that the principal accidentally crushed his grandson to death when he reversed, in order to save the face of the educator, but let his wife take the blame, although this person looks good, in fact, the psychology has long been **. Without this explanation, the film would not have been able to explain the headmaster's insane behavior. 
Therefore, "Monster" has become the most unflavored Hirokazu Kore-eda. In this work, we do not see the delicate and quiet candlelight and understanding of interpersonal relationships in "Walking Forever", "Sea Street Diary", "Thief Family", and "Like Father and Son", but replace it with the theme of Yuji Sakagaki's style and the carnival of strange feelings. After all, shaking the red cloth like a matador to stimulate the parents, and holding down the teacher to prevent him from speaking, only the ** principal written by Yuji Sakagaki can do it. 
Another theme of the film is the super-friendship between Minato and Iri, which is also the most boring of the three acts. In the first two acts, there are at least some heart-warming fragments (such as collective apologies), and the third act is full of falsehood and artificiality, in which two young boys climb up to the high platform and stand side by side in a cage looking at the vast world is a very symbolic scene, representing their innocent relationship that is not accepted by the world, but the imagination of the collapse of the universe and the reversal of time in this scene is **, more precisely, it is to say Sakagaki's iconic golden sentence in a naïve tone disguised as a child. BL Shimizu Fumizu The generally overly clean third act is rigid and conceptual, but it reflects the double assumptions of children and heterosexuality and homosexuality.
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, written by Yuji Sakagaki, starring Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayama, Yuko Tanaka, and even the soundtrack is Ryuichi Sakamoto's posthumous work, "Monster" brings together the first-line lineup of today's Japanese film industry, but the result is so mediocre that it is a problem from the idea. The real theme of "Monster" is not the incomprehensibility between people, nor the forbidden love of teenagers, when Saori and Pauli anxiously search for their missing children in the midst of a storm, the Trinity complex, which haunts a generation of Japanese filmmakers such as Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and even Hideaki Anno and Makoto Shinkai, and is the source of their creation, is about to come out again.
The tunnel with the mudslide is a miniature version of the tsunami, and the theme of search and rescue overshadows the incomprehensibility between people in the first two chapters and the LGBT in the third chapter. The moment of the disaster is also an opportunity for the protagonist's interpersonal relationship to be repaired, the mother who expects her son to get married when he grows up and live an ordinary and normal family life, the teacher who expects her students to grow into manhood, and the next generation with ambiguous sexual orientation, united under the humanitarian banner of We are all the same human beings, to complete the mainstream acceptance of heresy and the return of heresy.
It was the disaster that forced the characters to make a hasty reconciliation, and it was the disaster that summoned a larger community than the family that Hirokazu Kore-eda talked about—the nation. However, the viewer should not forget that the real monsters who define people as normal and extraordinary are also nations. As a result, the nation not only hid its responsibilities in its happy reconciliation, but was given a new life after reconstruction, and so far "Monster" has also completed the embarrassing slide from "Rashomon" to "Crash".