Mother

Do Joon is borderline retarded and easily taken advantage of. His mother tries her best to take care of him, but he’s fallen in with Jin Tae (Ku Jin) a small-time crook who manipulates Do Joon as much as he looks after him. With friends like that, it all looks very bad when Do Joon is arrested for murder and his mother tries to discover the truth of the matter, knowing in her heart that her simple little angel could never be capable of such a crime, and that the bad people he hangs out with are almost certainly using him as the fall guy..

There aren’t many films out there casting a female lead in a traditionally male-dominated genre that in attempting to prove that women are just as good as men don’t succumb to a tendency to make them into men. Think, for example of the shift between the first Pirates Of The Carribbean film and the two sequels. Somehow the smart and inventive heroine of the first film transformed into a sword wielding tomboy who appeared to have lost her intelligence and replaced it with blustery yelling. It’s not an uncommon problem, as it seems a lot of writers struggle to think outside the beating-down-doors kind of response when trying to solve intractable problems. Thankfully, Mother is a film that wrestles with the problems of a middle-aged woman trying to deal with violent men without resorting to the cheap fix of giving her a gun and a pissed-off attitude. Instead, we watch as a woman struggles to be taken seriously by men, but never gives up her quest to prove that her son was framed.

That reason alone should be enough to commend Mother, but not only does it tell apleasingly original story that, at its heart, examines the consequences of over-protective mothering, it takes a refreshingly different, and for some perhaps odd, approach to its telling. There are plenty of twists and turns, some funny. some tense, and a black sense of humour runs throughout the film. The gradual revelations about the murdered girl’s unsavoury past are particularly disturbing, derailing our assumptions about the potential suspects and giving an insight into a social media culture gone mad. And always, there’s Kim Hye Ja’s beautifully determined performance as the titular mother

Mother is a film that manages to transcend its twist-filled format and deliver a highly innovative examination of obsession, love and grief  with an emotional wallop that makes it well worth your time.

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