Rating: 8.5 out of 10 fresh tomatoes
This is a great suspense/murder mystery directed by Bong Joon-Ho, who also did The Host (Korean: "Monster") several years ago. "The Host" was a hit in South Korea, and to me it was notable because it was a monster movie, but it showed a lot of intelligence and depth of emotion in the plot and characters.
This story is about a mother and her mentally challenged son. When a local teenage girl is found murdered, he becomes the prime suspect based on circumstantial evidence and is arrested. Convinced that her son is incapable of committing such a crime, his mother sets out to find the real killer.
Bong Joon-Ho is masterful in setting up plot points and manipulating information and doling it out to the viewer. He doesn't make it easy to figure the mystery out, and his pacing and progression deeper and deeper into the different layers of the film is really intelligent and thought out.
The irony is when the mystery is revealed, it's in the most simple, straight-forward way possible from a technical storytelling perspective. It's almost unsatisfying, but there are more layers to the film than solving the mystery that adds to the emotion and creepiness. It's a film I want to gush about to people who've seen it – the parallels, the reprises, the opening scene! – but don't want to give anything away to anyone who hasn't seen it, and I'm sure other people would point things out that would amaze me that I didn't notice.
Perhaps at the heart of this film is the title – mother. What mothers wouldn't do for their child, but they end up fucking them up anyway. Mothers are controversial characters in works of art and expression throughout the ages.
Even my own mother fucked her children up in so many ways, but do any of us think she was trying to? That she was a bad mother? No! Fucking up your children is part of the territory when it comes to motherhood. As a mother, you can do no right, but you will still always be the most important person in a child's life. (I don't think my mother was a bad mother, I think of my parents as bad parents – it was a team effort).
This film may not make you want to appreciate your mother more, it may not make you want you to be a little more forgiving or understanding. But if you're in a position of contemplating becoming a mother, you may want to think twice. This is a great piece of film, definitely worth seeing.
