Review by Justin Bateman
Stars Hye-ja Kim, Bin Won, Goo Jin, Yoon Jae-Moon, Mi-sun Jun, Young-Suck Lee, Sae-Beauk Song, Mun-hee Na, Woo-hee Chun, Byoung-Soon Kim
Written by Joon-ho Bong & Eun-kyo Park
Certification UK 15 | US R
Runtime 128 minutes
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
In a summer, nay, a general climate of sequels, remakes and banal rom-coms it's refreshing to see an original story which doesn't rely on star power or special effects. Okay, so maybe a subtitled film from South Korea won't be too everyone's liking but if you want good quality cinema sometimes you need to look a little further afield. Mother is one such gem.
Do-joon (Bin Won) is a young adult but has the mind of a child. He lives with his mother, Hye-ja (Hye-ja Kim), a widow barely scraping a living selling grain while performing unlicensed acupuncture on the side. One night, Do-joon arranges to go drinking in Jin-tae (Goo Jin) but when the later fails to turn up, Do-joon gets very drunk. The next morning, a high school girl is found dead on the rooftop of a local building. The circumstantial evidence points to Do-joon, and without much investigation, the police arrest and charge the young man with her murder. With no memory of the night in question he naively signs a confession admitting his guilt, after which his distraught mother begins her own enquiries to prove his innocence.
As with many good films, Mother works on a number of levels. Perhaps most obviously it's a fascinating and taut thriller, a whodunit with an unlikely protagonist. The story is told in a fairly standard linear style but as Hye-ja uncovers more information, neat little flashbacks slowly fill in the gaps. The second way in which Mother works is as a family drama, albeit a not very traditional one. For all Do-joon's insistence that he is a grown-up, the fact that he still sleeps in his mother's bed is indicative of how he truly feels. Likewise, Hye-ja treats him like a child, because to all intents and purposes he is. That she loves him is never in doubt - the intrigue comes in the shape of just how far she's willing to go to extricate him from his prison sentence.
As well as these intellectual and emotional aspects, mother benefits from wonderfully understated visual beauty. The locale is rarely a step up from ghetto life and yet director Joon-ho Bong creates a series of memorable images with inventive camera angles and simply by having the vision to frame certain shots in such a way that they look like paintings brought to life. Although the film is never flashy in style or content, it has a quiet magnetism which draws the viewer in and hangs on right to the end. Alternately off-kilter, amusing, sad and tense, it is well worth seeking out the embrace of Mother.