Blu-Ray Review: Riveting Moral Drama of Bong Joon-Ho’s ‘Mother’

CHICAGO – Korean Bong Joon-Ho is one of our best working filmmakers with three films that deserve consideration among the best of the last decade — the procedural thriller “Memories of Murder,” the brilliant monster movie “The Host,” and the dark drama of this year’s “Mother,” now released on Blu-ray and DVD. With extensive special features, the Blu-ray of this mesmerizing film should bring one of 2010’s best films to a wider audience.

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.5/5.0

Like so many of our best filmmakers, Bong brilliantly plays with audience expectations. He displays his clear inspirations — Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, others — while also feeling completely original. “Mother” is such a daring, unique film that it’s almost difficult to capture in words. It is filled with several remarkable twists and turns but it’s also far from your typical mystery/thriller. In an era when more and more films feel produced by a machine, it’s so refreshing to see something as strikingly unique as “Mother.”

Mother was released on Blu-ray and DVD on July 20th, 2010
Photo credit: Magnolia

The star and title character in “Mother” is played by Kim Hye-ja in one of the best performances of the year to date. Bong Joon-ho told me that she’s comparable to Doris Day in her home country, a fact worth mentioning because her character in “Mother” goes to some very unusual places for someone considered so matriarchal in Korea. Let’s just say that Doris Day never played a mother like this one.

Mother was released on Blu-ray and DVD on July 20th, 2010 Photo credit: Magnolia

Her character, only referred to as “Mother,” is the single parent of the mentally handicapped Do-Jun (Won Bin) and the two live a relatively sheltered and clearly dysfunctional life in a small Korean town. Do-Jun spends a lot of time with a young man named Jin-tae (Jin Gu) who first seems like he could be a bad influence on the easily persuaded boy. The film opens with the oddly-matched duo assaulting a few men on a golf course after they believe they nearly ran Do-Jun down in the street.

The action of the film begins on a drunken evening when Do-Jun follows a young girl home from the bar. She disappears into the shadows and we see Do-Jun continue up a path and pause to look back. The next morning, the girl is found brutally murdered near where Do-Jun saw her last. Did he return and kill her or is the slow young man being framed for a crime simply because it’s easy to put such an easily convinced suspect away for a crime they didn’t commit? If he didn’t do it, is it possible he saw who did? Could his own friend have set him up?

Whether or not Do-Jun committed murder is definitely the foundation of “Mother” but the mystery of it is not emphasized in the same way that most American filmmakers would focus on the subject. More important and more interesting is that Do-Jun’s mom doesn’t really care if he did it or not. She needs him out of jail either way. The two have a dangerously close relationship (that is, at least slightly and possibly heavily, incestuous), and she is willing to go down whatever dark alley it takes to release him from behind bars and clear his name.

Like any mother, she has at least convinced herself that he is innocent but she is driven to free him regardless and to go to whatever lengths it takes to do so including into her own dark past with him to try to get him to remember exactly what happened that night. Her journey into the dark side of the tracks makes for a riveting thriller but it’s the psychological implications of Bong’s masterful drama that makes it such riveting cinema.

Mother was released on Blu-ray and DVD on July 20th, 2010 Photo credit: Magnolia

Kim is great but this is Bong Joon-Ho’s movie in the way that our best filmmakers put their own stamp on their work merely through their skilled direction. Bong brilliantly leads us down the path in the same way that the girl guides the lonely Do-Jun through town. The way he slowly reveals little elements of his story is not unlike the way Alfred Hitchcock was always so clearly one step ahead of the audience and so talented at making us want to catch up.

What’s most fascinating about the script for “Mother” is that, for the most part, we know only what the title character does. We follow her around town trying to solve the mystery and we only reach the end of the road with her, making the journey as important as the destination. It’s a fantastic film in the way it unfolds in ways that feel both reminiscent of classic mysteries and also completely new.

And the Blu-ray release is a beauty. The HD transfer is merely average (but that could be because I’ve seen some great ones lately) although it’s never bad enough to be distracting. And Magnolia deserves praise for giving the film a Korean 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track.

The special features are notable and extensive with the behind-the-scenes featurette running feature-length at over 90 minutes. Once again, Magnolia proves to be one of the best studios for foreign film fans, all of whom needs to see “Mother” as soon as possible.

Special Features:
o Making of “Mother”
o A Look at Actress Kim Hye-ja
o Behind the Scenes
o Production Design Featurette
o Supporting Actors Featurette
o Cinematography Featurette
o Music Score Featurette

[14]	By BRIAN TALLERICO [15] Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com [14]