Mother (Joon-ho Bong, 2009): South Korea

Reviewed by Brian Livesay. Viewed at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre during Afi Film Festival 2009.

This is the first Korean film that I have seen and I was very impressed with the way that it was filmed and how well the story came together, as well as the level of acting of the Mother (Kim Hye-Ja). She did an incredible job portraying the overprotective but well-meaning mother in the film.

The opening scene starts out in a vast and ever-expanding wheat field with Kim Hye-Ja, who plays the mother, dancing to the opening music. She plays an eccentric overbearing mother in the film who, even though, can be a bit odd at times, still manages to be a very likeable  character in the film. She treats her son as a child who is under 10 years of age in the film even though he is in his twenties. She feeds him (literally), sleeps in the same bed (partly due to their economic situation), and treats him with little confidence as far as him being able to take care of himself.

His best friend is a bit of a trouble maker but not that bad of a guy. She chides him about hanging out with him and she asks him if he understands, and he says yes mother as he walks out the door. She then asks him where he is going and he tells her that he is going out to see this same friend. It is this type of casual defiance that allows the audience to laugh and possibly relate to this situation that is similiar to one that a mother might be dealing with when confronting a teenager who is defiant and insistant on doing things their way even though it is against the parents will.

During the film her son gets himself into trouble after a drinking binge where he forgets nearly everything that happenned during the previous night, but somehow a teenage girl ends up dead along the same route that he took home. He is questioned by police and in his defiant and hung-over state, he admits to killing the girl even though he remembers nothing from the previous evening. This infuriates the mother and sends her on a determined mission to find the real killer and prove her sons innocence.

It is filled with many twists and turns which even brings the Mother to walk through the wheat field that was shown in the opening sequences of the film. She leaves no stone unturned resorting to trespassing, theft (of the possible murder weapon), kidnapping, and even murder all to help her son.

During the film she visits her son in jail to see if he has remembered anything and each time she visits he remembers more and more. When her son reveals to her a possible motive that the killer may have had for killing the girl, she begins to worry.  The film makers do a great job at keeping the audience involved in the storyline, and giving you just enough information to keep you guessing throught the duration of the film.

During one of her visits, the son reveals that he remembers his mother had tried to kill him at a young age (5 years old). This causes the mother some extreme emotional distress and her being an accupuncture specialist, offers to jab him in a certain spot that will take away all of his bad memories. He accuses her of trying to kill him again and she storms out of the jail visibly upset. It makes you wonder whether or not she was going to cause his death, or just cause him to lose his memory. At the end of the film you find out which scenario would have occurred, but I will leave that up to the viewer to learn when they watch the film. This is a highly recomended film and I will make a deliberate attempt to see some of the other films by this director such as “The Host” and “Tokyo” which he co-directed.