"Mother" is a deadpan, darkly funny Korean murder mystery from the director of "The Host," that beasts-from-the-deep South Korean sleeper of a few years back.
A school girl has been brutally murdered, her body dangled off a roof for the whole town to see.
And a maddeningly forgetful lout, a slow-witted twenty something the locals call "Retard," stands accused of the crime.
But there are legitimate questions about the crime. There's injustice at every turn. The bumpkin cops are too incompetent and too lazy to put much effort into investigating. They've tortured the kid with threats and an apple.
That's right. An apple.
The lawyer for the accused is a drunken, distracted karaoke addict. The neighbors are venal cranks who're all too happy to be rid of the cretinous kid.
The only thing standing between baby-faced Yoon do-Joon (Won Bin) and prison is his mother – a fiercely protective herb seller, part-time acupuncturist and now, thanks to her son's arrest, amateur sleuth.
"My son didn't do it!"
"Mother" is a deadpan, darkly funny Korean murder mystery from the director of "The Host," that beasts-from-the-deep South Korean sleeper of a few years back.
Kim Hye-ja has the title role, a woman teetering on the edge of poverty and the edge of polite society. She's lived with this simpleton son, endured his abuse, his disreputable friend (Ku Jin). Something drives her to sneak about, to find the witnesses the cops never questioned, to ask the questions the cops never bothered with. Is it motherly love, guilt or outrage at the injustice of it all?
Director Joon-ho Bong maintains the mystery even as he is walking us through an entirely too leisurely two hours and nine minute telling of this tale. This is a South Korea not seen on The Travel Channel – testy, intolerant small-minded small-townsfolk, promiscuous glue-sniffing teens, and an entitled elite that figures it is above the petty dictates of "the law."
Bin Won is comically hateful as the ingrate son – rubbing his temples trying to "focus" his feeble memory, goofily misunderstanding the seriousness of his plight. But it is Hye-ja Kim that carries Mother, making her mother an all-suffering, all-enduring victim who acquires more spine and subtler shadings as the story deliberately, patiently reveals its secrets
Cast: Hye-ja Kim, Won Bin,Jin Ku, Je-Moon Yoon
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes
Rating: R for language, some sexual content, violence and drug use.