Film picks: Monster, The Roundup: No Way Out and Master Gardener
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Eita Nagayama (left) in Monster.
PHOTO: GOLDEN VILLAGE
Monster (M18)
126 minutes, now showing, 4 stars
In a small regional city in Japan, single mother Saori (Sakura Ando) lives with her son Minato (Soya Kurokawa). When he begins behaving strangely, she comes to suspect abuse by a teacher, Hori (Eita Nagayama).
This film was screened in competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it won Best Screenplay for Yuji Sakamoto.
The title of this drama plays with the idea of the villainous creature at the heart of every mystery.
This mystery, in turn, hinges on the idea of conflicting realities, such as the ones that children experience but keep from their parents, and the ones that grown-ups like Saori and Hori live through but deceive themselves about, for reasons of their own.
Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, as he does in each of his films, makes everything feel grounded. But more so than in his previous films, there is a propulsive drive to the storytelling in this work that pushes viewers towards a gut-wrencher of a finale.
The Roundup: No Way Out (NC16)
Don Lee (right) in The Roundup: No Way Out.
PHOTO: GOLDEN VILLAGE
105 minutes, now showing, 3 stars
Korean-American action heavyweight Don Lee’s third round as rogue detective Ma Seok-do is set seven years after 2022’s The Roundup. The inspector has been promoted to the Metropolitan Investigation Unit where he is again cracking skulls as well as a criminal case of a party drug circulating around Seoul nightclubs.
The crunchy screwball violence revels in his outsized physique and comic delivery, but the hero’s ridiculous invincibility is becoming one-note.
The Roundup: Punishment is on tap for 2024, and would do well to reintroduce either a compelling villain or the team camaraderie of the early Geumcheon Police Station days.
Master Gardener (M18)
(From left) Quintessa Swindell and Joel Edgerton in Master Gardener.
PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION
111 minutes, now showing, 3 stars
Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) is the head gardener of a grand estate in the American South. Chaos – followed by violence, this being a film by American auteur Paul Schrader – enters his tidy sanctuary when he takes in his employer’s (Sigourney Weaver) grandniece (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice.
Roth hides a shameful past: He was a hitman for white supremacists. His base impulses are reawakened when an uneasy attraction develops between the rehabilitated extremist and the 20something biracial pupil half his age.
The stern, pressurised crime thriller is concerned with grace, atonement and forgiveness rather than anything so trivial as plausibility, as Schrader continues to attend to his complex spiritual themes with uncompromising intellectual rigour.
