Mother

The director of this film Bong Joon-ho is one of those directors that struck me as a pretty good director the first time I saw one of his films, The Host. It is a great monster film and memorable for a lot of reasons. This film, Mother, is not as good or memorable but it is still an impressive thriller that I quite enjoyed.


Mother is set in South Korea in a small town and is the story of mentally unstable kid in his late teens or early twenties who is charged with a local town murder. His mother is one those mothers that will do anything to support her son and the film is about her trying to assist him and do whatever is necessary to have him found "not guilty" in the criminal proceedings.

The best part of this film is doubt the storytelling. Bong Joon-ho really takes a rather simple story and turns it into a story with many sub-plots that goes in many directions. The material is very good and the plot is compelling. This is very original and quite interesting and in some ways, it can be shocking.

Most of the characters are complex and take some time to be put together that takes work but the mother character played by Kim Hye-je is in my opinion the most complex character. The character is done in a way that is not very common, and it has to be acted just right for it to be believable and Kim Hye-ja succeeds with this. The supporting cast is good and that helps the character. This lead character is really done up well in a kind of  lovely way and Kim Hye-ja really wins you over.

Won Bin plays a kid who is charged with murder. This is another difficult character to play and Bong Joon-ho executes it very well and this helps the film even more than the Mother character.

Even with a good plot and characters, the film does kind of have a rather pointless opening. I don't think it really adds to the film. The ending is not really what I would have wanted either and the scenes, especially the opening scene just seem to lengthen the film by at least twenty minutes.

Aside from some very small flaws, Mother is a quite interesting thriller that has a great twist and is pretty likable in a lot of ways. I think it is one of my favorite foreign films ever for a lot of reasons.

4/5