Japan’s Kore-eda Hirokazu, a multiple Cannes award winner for his films “Like Father, Like Son” (2013) and “Shoplifters” (2018), now brings us his latest Cannes 2023 award winner “Monster,” a multi-perspective tale about two 5th graders who find shelter from the emotional storms of school, teachers and parents by playing alone together after class. For the first time, Hirokazu had no hand in writing the script. Instead, he collaborated with Yuji Sakamoto, whose award-winning screenplay has been compared to the 1950 world-wide art house hit “Rashomon.” Also noteworthy, “Monster” was the last film scored by the great Ryuichi Sakamoto (“The Last Emperor”).

The story begins when widowed, working-class single mother Saori Mugino (a radiant Sakura Ando, “Shoplifters”) notices that her elementary school age son Minato (Soya Kurokawa) is behaving strangely and surmises that the culprit is his school teacher Hori (the talented Eita Nagayama). She believes that the teacher physically attacked Minato. She then drives to the school to meet with the principal (Akihiri Kakuta), who is grieving the death of a grandchild due to an accident, perhaps caused by her. Saori and Minato are also grieving the death of Minato’s father. In fact, his mother makes Minato “talk” to a small shrine of his father, featuring a photograph. Minato asks Saori repeatedly about his father being “reborn” and in what form he will come.

We look at events from three points of view concerning Minato: his school and his friendship with a boy named Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), who has been bullied and whose father mistreats him. Yes, we have monsters, including a typhoon. The perspective-splitting bears strange fruit. For example, Saori comes to believe that Hori, the teacher, has told Minato that he has the brain of a pig. We will come to learn that it was Yori’s vile and abusive father who used that expression to belittle his own son.

In all three points of view – the mother’s, teacher’s and son’s – we see a large building in the city (the film was shot in Nagano, Japan) ablaze and hear and see fire trucks. A rumor has been spread that Hori, who has a girlfriend, was inside a “hostess bar” in the building when the fire broke out. Hori is seriously disturbed by Saori’s accusations. He was in fact trying to help the boy.

The plot can at times become even more contrived than usual. But, on the whole, “Monster” is more interesting and humane than that brain-twisting waste of time “Glass Onion” (2022). One of the poignant mysteries involves a missing shoe. Minato and Yori ride their bicycles to an unused bridge beneath a hill, where the find an abandoned trolley car. They turn it into their clubhouse and decorate it. Yori goes on about the expansion of the universe and how when the expansion stops there will be a “big crunch,” and time will move backward. In many ways, “Monster” is another variation of “Stranger Things” with its own version of the “Upside Down.” But in this case, the “upside-down” is something the boy’s learn about themselves and what it will mean for them. It’s a big crunch, for sure.

Rated PG-13. In Japanese with subtitles. At the AMC Boston Common, AMC Liberty Tree and other suburban theaters.. Grade: A-