Mother - Bong Joon-ho

As opening shots go, Mother has a great one. Kim Hye-ja, as the title character, walks through a field towards the camera, and as the opening credits run alongside her, she begins an awkward non-sequitur of a dance — comical, strange, and delightful in its effect. We wonder what, if anything, it means. Will we come back to this field, and if so, what will transpire there? The answer to the first question is yes; the answer to the second I won’t reveal.

With some movies, the more I like it, the less I want to talk about it. I want viewers to experience it the way I did, with scenes revealing themselves instead of being revealed by me. Mysteries are the worst, especially when they’re the best; how to comprehensively explain one’s effectiveness without discussing where the story goes or how it gets there? Woe is me, woe is me.

But bravely, I persist.

Mother is a terrific film that doesn’t opt for big, twisty narrative exertions, but overturns our expectations nevertheless. It’s directed by South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, whose previous feature, The Host, took the monster-movie genre and elevated it with patient technique and a command of atmosphere. Here he’s got another potboiler of a plot, molded by his steady hand into a taut character study about a woman (Kim), who would do anything for her son, and boy would she ever!

Her son is Do-joon (Won Bin), 28-years-old and developmentally challenged, with a faulty memory, childlike demeanor, and poor impulse control. Her devotion is clear from the first scene, when she watches him intently across the street; after a car violently screeches by, she explodes onto the scene, desperate to make sure he’s alright, panicked at the sight of blood, which turns out to be her own. Their relationship we watch with uneasy interest, in particular a scene in which he slips into bed with her wearing only his underwear; the scene is not sexual, and neither character’s intent is remotely erotic, yet Bong’s camera lingers, as if considering, and pressing us to consider, whether we can reconcile a relationship with such an absence of boundaries.

Their relationship is tested after a murder. A young woman, Ah-jung, is found displayed in an eerie tableau, hanging off the edge of a roof’s parapet, her long hair dangling in the air. It takes a few moments to realize we’re viewing a crime scene, and that the curious onlookers on the street below are police. Evidence found on the scene implicates Do-joon, who does not understand the charges but is readily susceptible to the physical threats made against him during interrogation. He confesses, and the overworked police are happy to put the crime behind them, no matter who really committed it.

But Do-joon’s mother is desperate, and the film becomes the story of her investigation into various suspects, including Do-joon’s presumed friend Jin-tae (Jin Goo), and an escaped mental patient named JP. Kim’s performance is the centerpiece of the film, creating a woman of seeming frailty who conceals fierce protectiveness motivated, we learn, by not only devotion but crushing guilt. The mystery is compelling, but what raises it to thrilling levels is Kim, so doggedly determined, but in her way mysterious, not revealing all at once the things she has done, can do, and will do. At the beginning she danced obliviously, but in that instance, as during the rest of the film, she is much more than she seems.

She performs acupuncture without a license and sometimes offers to stimulate a pressure point that causes troubling memories to drift peacefully out of mind. Her son, by virtue of his mental handicap, is naturally inclined to forget. But she’s good at it too.

Watch a trailer for the film here: