At the recent 4th annual Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong, Mother took home the Best Picture prize, and actress Kim Hye-ja (the titular ‘mother’) won for Best Actress. Bong Joon-ho lost the Best Director statuette to Lu Chuan, whose heart-wrenching City of Life and Death chronicled the rape of Nanjing, but his directorial efforts have not gone un-lauded since Mother was a Cannes film market buzz film and then premiered at TIFF to big praise.
The story is simple. A widow lives alone with her only son, Do-joon (Won Bin). He’s in his late 20s, he’s a good kid, but he’s a bit slow. When a young woman is murdered in the community, the helpless young man becomes the prime suspect. In spite of a lack of real evidence, police pursue the easy target, forcing his mother to take on the formidable task of proving his innocence on her own.
When the help of unsympathetic law enforcement and callous lawyers predictably doesn’t get her very far, mother takes matters entirely into her own hands, retracing the steps not only of her son, but also the murder victim. The old lady’s steely determination as she interviews potential witnesses, collects evidence and tries to solve the complicated case often lands her in tense, dangerous situations, but no setback could be large enough to deter her from her mission. Even when the plot gets a little too complex and twisty toward the end, Bong sustains a high level of tension throughout. Mother is a great thriller, perhaps destined to be remembered as a classics of Korean noir.
Much like one of Bong’s previous films, the 2006 hit The Host, this is at its core a story about family in disguise (in this case, a family tale wrapped in a carefully constructed thriller, and in the case of The Host, a really fun creature feature). Mother is a bit longer than it needs to be, but Bong creates such a thick atmosphere of suspense and so skillfully composes each shot that it never feels like it’s dragging, and it’s easy to get lost in the gorgeous imagery.
With Mother, Bong Joon-ho can comfortably take his place alongside directors like Kim Jee-woon (A Tale of Two Sisters, The Good, the Bad, the Weird) and Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Thirst) as one of the masters of contemporary Korean genre cinema.
