Any chance of Korean director Bong Joon-ho getting typecast on the basis of his cult-sensation monster movie The Host is effectively dashed with Mother, his equally-quirky murder-mystery.
Wide apart in genre, the two movies have in common a story told against the backdrop of an utterly strange but believable dysfunctional family — this one Oedipal in the extreme.
The title character, played by Kim Hye-ja, is a sweet-faced single mom who runs an herb shop and dotes on her seemingly developmentally challenged twentysomething son Do-joon (Won Bin), answering his every spoiled whim for favourite meals, money, etc. and even sharing a bed with him for emotional comfort.
Her over-protectiveness, however, has a weak spot. She can’t protect Do-joon from the sinister influence of his sociopathic best friend Jin-tae (Jin Goo), with whom he gets drunk daily and is drawn into trouble with the law.
One such misadventure is key to the cascade of events in the movie. When Do-joon and Jin-tae are nearly run over by some rich executives in an expensive car, they follow them to a golf course to terrorize them and vandalize the vehicle. Oddly, Do-joon gets distracted, and uses the opportunity to pluck golf balls from a water hazard.
One of those golf balls becomes Exhibit A some time later when a fascinated Do-joon follows a schoolgirl, who turns up dead the next morning.
In Bong’s hands, both the golf course incident and the criminal investigation are deftly handled pieces of black comedy. The Korean city where this takes place is never named, but it’s clearly a small town, given the utter (literal) cluelessness of the buffoonish police, none of whom have ever handled a murder before.
Of course, they go to the obvious suspect, Do-joon, and close the book on all other possibilities — leaving Mother to become an investigator, possessed with the certainty of her son’s innocence.
Initial suspicion that Jin-tae is the real killer (her stalking of him verges on voyeuristic) morphs into a strange alliance with her son’s bad influence. Jin-tae, whose friendship with Do-joon is never based on anything like affection, is along for the ride seemingly for the thrill of following a tangled trail of illicit sex and violence.
The acting is solid all around. Won is so sympathetic, it seems out of the realm of possibility for his character to be the killer. Jin’s feral Jin-tae prowls the streets he inhabits like a shark — a moral null space in a movie that plays with the good-guy/bad-guy plot arc we expect in the genre.
But it’s Kim who really fuels the plot, with a sweet-faced performance that allows furious passion to escape in dribs and drabs.
Mother opens and closes with the same interesting tableau — a scene of Mom dancing through a field of flowers, exulting in what looks like freedom. It’s a murky metaphor. Is her relationship with her son a prison?
In recent years, Korean cinema seems to have found focus in Hollywood genres and golden eras that have been all but forgotten here. In that vein, Bong’s Mother — in Korean with English subtitles — is like classic film noir, sinister mood-making with an irreverence toward convention.
(This film is rated R)
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