The best of director Kore-eda Hirokazu’s films achieve a rare quality: a sublime everydayness, in which simple matters of life take on breathtaking, poetic shape. He’s a close and affectionate studier of the vagaries and specificities of little corners of human experience, finding offbeat angles of approach to tell broadly appealing stories. Sometimes he gets dinged (unfairly, in my opinion) for being overly sentimental, or too cutesy, which is always a danger when trafficking in so much warmhearted sincerity.

His new film, Monster, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, initially seems to be a simple, issue-driven movie designed to yank at heartstrings. Sakura Ando, so memorable in Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, plays Saori, a dry cleaner in a small Japanese city whose son, tweenage Minato (Kurokawa Soyo), is having some mental health difficulties. He’s quiet and moody at home, he’s acting out at school, and in one frightening instance he seems to have a propensity for self-harm. 

Kore-eda sets this all up in such a way that we, the perhaps slightly jaded audience, assume we know what’s coming. The film will chronicle Naori’s struggle to reach her son, and his journey toward betterment. Naori’s husband has died at some indefinite point in the past, so it seems that grief will come to bear on this process of understanding and healing. 

But then Sakamoto Yuji’s script leads us in unexpected directions. Minato claims that a teacher, Mr. Hori (Nagayama Eita), has been abusing him at school, emotionally and physically. Thus Naori begins a campaign to get justice for her son, facing an unyielding principal, Makiko (Tanaka Yuko), as she goes up against a rigid and indifferent system. Hori tells Naori that Minata has been bullying a classmate, Yori (the marvelous Hiragi Hinata), a target of much teasing at school because of his fey comportment. Yori, when confronted, insists that he and Minata are in fact friends.

The story morphs again, looping back to show us other characters’ perspectives as the film gradually reveals the truth of the matter. This makes Monster something of a mystery (who started the fire that opens the film? What is the strange place in the woods where Naori finds her son late one night?), though Kore-eda keeps things relatively grounded, realistic. The film is essentially concerned with how a secret, closely held by private fear and societal demand, can affect far more people than just the one keeping it. Read no further if you want to avoid slight spoilers.

What Monster gradually becomes is something not too dissimilar from last year’s overwrought (though award-winning) Cannes feature Close, in which the friendship between two school age boys is torn asunder by the sneering attention of the outside world. Monster is more explicit about the nature of its central relationship: there is something beyond a friendly rapport between Minata and Yori, an attraction that has sent Minata reeling. Yori, meanwhile, is under the thumb of his domineering father, who tries (at times violently) to impose masculinity on his son.

Quite unlike Close, Monster is not predicated on grand tragedy; its aim is not to instruct through the worst outcome imaginable. Instead, Kore-eda, ever the humanist, gracefully and sensitively susses out Minata’s furtive pain, while insightfully examining how his repression affects the lives of those around him. There’s a deep, and never pandering, empathy at work here, an allowance of confusion and moral error that keeps Monster from the smarmy and didactic lows of so many social-issues films. 

Kore-eda once again works wonders with his cast. Sando gives another beguiling, nuanced turn, while the two young actors seem discovered in their natural environment. There is nothing manufactured about the boys’ idiosyncrasy, none of the strained precociousness endemic to movies about special, oddball kids. But Kore-eda does not hold back on big feelings. There is a profound drama at the center of the film, a dawning acceptance of self lyrically rendered. 

Scoring all this are compositions by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, billows of pensive, poignant music that suggest both ebb and flow, growth and retreat. Sakamoto’s melodies combine with Kore-eda’s lush images—summery greens and pale blues, alternately crisp and bleary–to dazzling effect, creating a picture of life in all its hushed beauty, its gnawing ache. One comes to this festival in search of at least one good cry, which Monster provides generously and without cynical manipulation. The film, at once warmly exuberant and carefully restrained, is a mighty entry in the queer coming-of-age canon, built with the compassion and inventiveness so signature to its creator.