New DVD: Mother

October 25, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Hye-ja Kim also played a character named "Mother" in a 1999 South Korean film called "Mayonnaise."

Maternal love knows no bounds in Joon-ho Bong’s haunting new murder mystery, Mother. Not quite on par with the South Korean director’s 2003 masterwork, Memories of a Murder, it’s still a powerful drama about the distance one woman will go to clear her son of a crime she knows he didn’t commit.

Yoon Do-joon (Bin Won) is a grown man but mentally challenged in some unspecified way. His eagle-eyed acupuncturist Mother (Hye-ja Kim) seems to watch over him far too carefully, but her worry is justified when a schoolgirl is murdered and Do-joon is the leading suspect. He is subsequently arrested and charged with the slaying. Unable to get the help she needs from police and lawyers, Mother decides to conduct her own investigation, at first fitfully and then obsessively. She is eventually aided by Do-joon’s friend, Jin-tae (Ku Jin), who enjoys playing the strong-armed detective a little too much. Together they try to piece together dark elements from the slain girl’s past which may point to the real killer.

You may see the main plot twist coming, but Bong’s films are so affecting not so much for reveals but for his deft ability to shift tone and mash up genres. In one scene, Mother is summoned to a bar to meet a high-powered lawyer she believes can clear her son. He is half-drunk and flanked by call girls as he explains a plea deal to her. When she hesitates to accept, he begins to scream wildly into a karaoke microphone at the frightened woman. It’s a bizarre bit of grotesque comic horror that speaks so clearly to everything Mother is feeling inside. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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