Until Avatar came along, Bong Joon-ho’s wonderful monster movie The Host was the all time top-grossing movie in South Korea. His fourth feature, Mother is an impeccably made, deeply affecting thriller which, if there were any justice, would reach just as many cinema-goers as Cameron’s turgid efforts…but I know we can’t expect miracles here.
The film follows an unnamed matriarch (Kim Hye-ja) struggling against the weight of evidence and an impenetrable justice system to clear the name of her son who has been accused of murdering a local teenage girl. Her son, Yoon Do-joon (played with great conviction and ambiguity by Won Bin) is a childlike adolescent, struggling against his mental deficiency to remember exactly what happened on that faithful night.
On the face of it, this is a run of the mill 'whodunnit?' but in Joon-ho’s hands it becomes something much more elusive and exciting. Within the conventions of the crime drama, Joon-ho examines the intensity of the mother/son relationship in which the mother can at once know everything and nothing about her own child. Kim Hye-ja gives a deeply affecting performance, constantly teetering on a razor’s edge between righteous tenacity and hysteria. The audience is at first encouraged to admire the extent she will go to to clear her sons name but at the same time there is something at work behind the eyes which is a lot more sinister than mere maternal
dedication.
It is this uncertainty that drives the action of the film and as the story slowly unfolds, Joon-ho ingeniously plays with the audience expectations, revealing information in such a way that we are constantly questioning what we have seen. In this way it is a deeply cinematic feature in which everything can change by looking at things from a different angle. The care and attention given to every shot even recalls Hitchcock, as Joon-ho carefully composes each frame to only show the audience a version of the truth.
Mother is, by some distance, the best thriller I’ve seen so far this year and should cement Joon-ho’s reputation as one of the most talented directors working today.