Tell me about your mother . . .

Mother—a story of loneliness, obsession and grief—is an extraordinary film. Though it maintains Bong Joon-ho’s interest in sophisticated tonal complexity and generic self-reflexivity (hallmarks of earlier releases Memories of Murder and The Host), I’ll argue Mother to be his most successfully cohesive work of cinema, which is due, in part, to the multidimensional portrait of a woman in her late-sixties who dominates the narrative and will undertake whatever is necessary to protect her child (a mentally-disabled adult in his late-twenties) from unjust accusations of murder in a small, South Korean city. Kim Hye-ja, who plays the title role, is simply astounding. Kim appears in nearly every scene, and her character’s unlikely journey into the political quagmire of corrupt lawyers, provincial police detectives, disaffected teenagers, and South Korea’s penal system leads to discoveries and revelations which confound and, at times, provoke and disturb. This is surely screen acting at its finest. Furthermore, Bong Joon-ho toys with audience identification and reception, casting Kim (who appears to be South Korea’s version of Harriet Nelson having played mothers on television for decades) to play the morally ambiguous and certainly unglamorous role of the upstart detective who conducts her own procedural examination into the violent death of a young girl in order to clear her son’s name and presumed guilt. To build on the above comparison, the young man who plays the son, Do-joon, is Won Bin, a South Korean actor and sex symbol (just think Ricky Nelson). I won’t give any more away, but will comment on the first and last shots of the film, which present a sublimely ecstatic vision of human subjectivity that is best described as uncanny (which is about as close as I’m going to get to referencing Sigmund Freud).