I wholeheartedly recommend seeing Monster if you get the chance- as with Anatomy of a Fall, if you like it as much as I did you will want to see it again to fully appreciate its intricate, looping structure. It starts appearing to be about bullying and mental illness in a pre-teen’s school in Japan, but you soon learn it is much more than that. It wrong-foots you with each iteration, but it never felt to me like it was unfairly withholding information, and instead of merely repeating each version from a different angle, each strand adds new depth and richness to the first. It starts in a realist mode, and seems to drift into magical realism as the film goes on, but on a second viewing (which I have not had the chance to do yet) it may turn out to have been merely dream-like in places. I was left with the impression that there are narrative loose ends that were not tied up, but I might just have missed the resolution. And despite the title and some unsettling early scenes, in the end I felt moved and uplifted. The setting is prosaic, but shot inventively. The intricate plot tended to dominate my attention - I wasn’t as impressed by the acting on the whole, but that might have been a difficulty in “reading” Japanese acting and culture - in any case, the film’s other qualities kept me enthralled.