Mother
Release: Now available on DVD
Running time: 129 minutes
Rating: MA (strong violence and sex scene)
Bong Joon-ho tones down the absurdist, affectionate humor of his earlier film The Host to deliver a terrific psychological study of dark, intense impulses, an intellectual piece about man’s suffering and an emotional reflection of a mother’s need capacity for love.
Mother may not be as immediately visceral and broadly entertaining as his previous work, but it weaves a strongly intense web as a deeper, more complete story about our internal emotional worlds. As a filmmaker, he sensitively essays the material’s potential hysteria to deliver an absorbing, gripping modern thriller, a Dostoyevsky-like parable about fate’s cruelties.
In a small Korean town, acupuncturist Hye-ja (Kim Hye-ja) protects her grown, but mentally handicapped son, Do-joon (Won Bin). When her son is arrested for the murder of a teenage girl, Hye-ja sets off to find the real killer.
Bong Joon-ho shows a nice feel for classic, tightly directed tension. He surpasses his broader, less talented American counterparts with a clean, unpretentious visual style and simple, quietly affecting sound design which deftly augments the story’s dramatic intensity. In particular, the emotive score beautifully complements the direction’s rich texture. A key to the story’s success is also the effective use of technology- from mobile phones to modern acupuncture techniques- to contrast the story’s present trajectory with its past, effectively linking both timelines into the sharp narrative.
The film may be less entertaining and jocular than The Host, but Bong Joon-ho remains a filmmaker of real sympathy and wit, using often-comic situations to frame the story’s intense tragedy and pathos. Even as a scene focuses on another character or the story’s ongoing mystery, he focuses his camera on the mother’s face, which reveals her slowly absorbing interior landscape. There is something desperately moving about Kim Hye-ja’s very fine performance, a quietly wistful exploration of a mother’s intense determination and devotion to her fickle, but sweetly naïve, child.
Andrew Moraitis
