Film Reviews

Mother

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• Details: South Korea / 128mins (15A).

Director Joon-ho Bong likes to mess around with genres: his The Host was a comedy-drama-horror and his follow up, Mother, is a comedy-drama-thriller. But where The Host was a fun mix, Joon-ho Bong sometimes struggles to gel the quasi-Hitchcockian whodunit mash up this time around. When it does work, though, Mother can be a quirky delight.
She only goes by the name of Mother (Hye-ja Kim) and she's at the end of her tether: her business is failing, she runs an illegal acupuncture to make ends meet and her 27-year-old son Yoon Do-joon (Bin Won) is a handful. Mentally-challenged and totally dependent on his ageing mother and street-wise friend Jin-tae (Ku Jin), Yoon Do-joon needs them both when he is accused of murder. Walking home drunk one night, Yoon happens across Moon Ah-jung (Moon-hee Na) and he 'propositions' her. Nothing comes of it, as Moon ducks into an abandoned house. Yoon wanders home and goes to sleep but when Moon's body is found dangling over the edge of the roof of the abandoned building, Yoon is arrested for her murder. Not knowing what he's doing, he signs a confession, but Mother is determined to prove his innocence and is prepared to do anything to do it.
Not only is Joon-ho Bong content with mixing up genres, he loves subverting the audience's expectations at every turn. He opens his film with an 'arty' scene of a dour-faced Mother wandering through a picturesque field; still forlorn, Mother begins to dance and sway through the grass. Odd. Joon-ho Bong then settles into the story proper, introducing his characters in a peculiar fashion but then plays around with the comedy (there's a running gag where Moon Ah-jung's virtue is questioned again and again; "she couldn't even take a nap by herself" remains the best zinger) by hinting at an incestuous relationship between Mother and son. It's hard to get a handle on where the director is taking you, and just as you figure it out - BAM, you're confused again. It creates an air of unreliability and, in a thriller, this is gold dust.
But this can be a nuisance too, and the feeling that Mother would settle down and be one thing instead of a myriad of things won't go away. The pacing can slow just when things should be heating up and Mother, although always threatening to kick in, never finds the high gear it's looking for. The performances are oblivious to this, however: Hye-ja Kim, who usually plays the loving mother role in Korean TV dramas, which again sees Joon-ho Bong playing against type, doesn't put a foot wrong and she's more than ably supported by former Korean pop star Bin Won.

Review by Gavin Burke