mother

The latest film from award-winning Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host) is a unique murder mystery about a mother's primal love for her son. Mother is a devoted single parent to her simple-minded twenty-seven-year-old son, Do-joon. Often a source of anxiety to his mother, Do-joon behaves in foolish or simply dangerous ways. One night, while walking home drunk, he encounters a school girl whom he follows for a while before she disappears into a dark alley. The next morning, she is found dead in an abandoned building and Do-joon is accused of her murder. An inefficient lawyer and an apathetic police force result in a speedy conviction. Mother refuses to believe her beloved son is guilty and immediately undertakes her own investigation to find the girl’s killer. In her obsessive quest to clear her son’s name, Mother steps into a world of unimaginable chaos and shocking revelations.

“By miles the best thriller I’ve seen this year. Riveting and darkly funny. Bong Joon-Ho is a brilliant filmmaker.” (John Powers, Vogue)

"Go! As he previously did for the police procedural (Memories of Murder) and the monster movie (The Host), South Korea’s sublimely talented Bong Joon-ho takes another venerable pulp genre — the wronged-man thriller — and enthusiastically stands it on its head." (L.A. Weekly)

“An absolutely phenomenal film by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho, "Mother" (in Korean with excellent English subtitles) begins and ends with dance. In the title sequence, a woman who's neither young nor truly old gyrates mysteriously and abstractedly in the middle of a wheat field. In the coda, she literally prods herself to join young revelers on a bus, a half-seen presence in a surreal frieze. Between those two dances she travels on a journey of obsessive devotion to her 27-year-old son, Do-joon, a young man with an impaired brain—his buddy calls it a "special head"—and the face of an angel. (He's played affectingly, though never sentimentally, by Won Bin.)

“What a journey it is, for the unnamed single mother and for us. For the sake of simplicity— though nothing proves simple in the end, not even Do-joon's mind—let's say that the narrative operates on twin tracks. It's a story of maternal love that's the definition of unswerving, and a whodunit that's set in motion when the cops throw Do-joon in jail after blaming him for the murder of a local girl whose battered body has been found hanging over a railing on a terrace high above the town. He had followed her for a while from a bar the night before and he admits it, in his addled way, but the flimsy case against him has all the earmarks of a classic setup.

“If this sounds dramatic it surely is, and all the more so when Do-joon's mother decides to find the killer. But the filmmaker, Mr. Bong, won't be jailed by a single tone or style. By turns the story is comical (in another time and country, the bumbling detective that the mother becomes could have been played by Margaret Rutherford); satirical (the torpor that prevails in the police station, the decadence of the lawyer and his female entourage); startling (a memory of his childhood that Do-joon recovers unbidden); and sometimes deeply shocking. (If I so much as hinted at why, I'd be giving away some of the best movie surprises I've seen in years.)

“This is filmmaking of a high order. Mr. Bong, whose previous features include "Memories of Murder" and a marvelous monster flick called "The Host," may toss off an occasional reference to a classic director of the past. (A couple of scenes with simultaneous action in the foreground and background evoke Jean Renoir.) His fondness for discovering the bizarre beneath the mundane makes him a soul mate of David Lynch. But he's a distinctive stylist in his own right. I've never seen a director do what he does at the end of a scene with Do-joon in his cell—pull the camera slightly back, rather than push it in, for dramatic emphasis.

“And he's brilliant with actors, though Kim Hye-ja's performance in the title role may only be a case of his having hired a brilliant actress. Her character doesn't need a name. She's a thoroughly specific and eccentric mother who does acupuncture without a license (one of my favorite lines is "There's a meridian point that can loosen the knots in your heart") and she's every mother who has watched her child suffer. "Mother" has many points that can turn your heart inside out.” (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2010)

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