MOTHER

마더 (Ma-deo) | Bong Joon Ho | 2009

PLOT:

An anonymous lady lives in a small southern side town of South Korea. She lives off selling herbal medicinal ingredients and practicing illegal acupuncture works for her secret regular customer to feed herself and her son Do-Joon.

As an intellectually challenged man, Do Joon didn't have many friends, apart from Jin Tae; the town’s good-for-nothing unemployed slacker. Problems arose when a high school girl found dead on the roof of the junkyard, and the evidence leads the local police to believe that Do Joon was the murderer. This is the story about a mother’s fight to defend her son’s innocence, as she unraveled the other side of the story from the people she met along the way.

NOTES:

This movie is quite unsettling. 

It felt so close;not too close to triggers memories, but close enough to smack your head and get your attention. This is proper storytelling. 

Kim HyeJa delivered an intense performance; a close up of her face will give you goosebumps in this particular movie. That look, her close ups, will keep you on your seats. Her performance is filled with heartwarming (and wrenching) details of motherly actions, which makes it highly relatable to the audience. 

This movie blends heavyweight content with comical execution skillfully, without turning it into a comedy or a tearjerker drama. It is the in-betweens. Main story aside, there are issues on teenager’s life, social pressures, normative interaction and the stress of being outcasted from the society. Not as an accent or fillers, the issues are wisely dropped to shape relevance to the settings. It serves you layers after layers of uncertainty like a street magician, until the complexity of the story conveyed beautifully; it is blossoming towards the end. 

In the beginning, it’s like the ending. But in the end, it questions everything and answers nothing.

And this is one of the prettiest dramas I’ve ever seen.