Review by Karina Wilson
Hollywood loves Moms. Because Moms are special. Anyone who's seen The Changeling knows that the very act of squeezing out a puppy somehow makes you wise, wonderful, and better equipped to handle situations than any number of so-called professionals brandishing doctorates or years of experience in the field. Moms don't need licenses. Moms don't need to go to school. As Erin Brockovich says "I have kids. Learned a lot right there." Mother always knows best, right? It's hormonal.
Darling of last year's major film festivals, Bong Joon-Ho's astute psychological thriller turns all those preconceptions on their heads. Here, Mother (Kim Hye-ja) ticks a lot of the usual boxes (single parent, devoted to her son, struggling to make ends meet, defying authority figures who dismiss her as deranged) but she's no Leigh Anne Tuohy. For a start, her doe-eyed adult son, Do-Joon (Bin Won) suffers from a low IQ and a lousy memory. As he kicks around with his constantly-scheming buddy Jin-Tae (Yoon Jae-Mon), these disabilities factor into their small-town, small-time troublemaking. One morning they end up hassling yuppies at the local golf course after Do-joon is the victim of a hit-and-run. However, the next day, when the corpse of local teen slut, Moon Ah-Jung (Moon Hee-ra) is found displayed on the rooftop of an abandoned house, Do-Joon's antics make him the prime suspect. He can't remember what he did the night before, so he is arrested, and the local cops (who can't remember the last murder they investigated) close the case.
The only person who cares about a possible injustice is Mother. Her hysterical denial that her boy could be a killer is met with indifference by the police, and by the expensive lawyer she hires to defend him, so she turns private investigator. She stomps the streets in the rain, head bowed, asking awkward questions about Ah-Jung's movements over her last days. In the process she uncovers some raw, horrible truths, not only about her own past misdeeds in relation to her son, but also about the way the town treats and speaks about vulnerable girls.
Bong gets a mesmerizing, nuanced central performance from Kim Hye-ja, best known for her depiction of warm, maternal soap-style characters on Korean TV. While it's hard to find a moment when you can actually like Mother (when she curls up in bed with her 28 year old son? When she skulks in Jin-Tae's closet watching him have sex with a minor? When she hands out cash rewards to schoolboys in return for trash-talk about the dead girl?), she's always empathic. Although she's driven by delusions, most of her bad choices lie in the deep past, and, on screen, she only does what any devoted mother would do to clear her son's name.
Up to a point.
One of the great pleasures of this movie is its refusal to categorize characters as heroes or villains. Instead, individuals shimmy on the moral landscape: one minute Jin-Tae is blackmailing Mother out of her life savings, the next he's smashing a teenage thug's teeth out for repeating cruel gossip about her. Do-joon shifts through the entire spectrum between helpless victim and master manipulator. Ah-jung "hates all guys" but can't get enough of them, feeding her sexual addiction along with her grandmother's alcoholism. This lack of judgment allows Bong to present the denizens of this small town outside any kind of ethical framework. Often represented as small figures plodding through a dull, rain-soaked landscape, these characters are neither good nor evil, just reacting to the moment. Mother does what she does, not because it's right or wrong, but because she's driven by a prime directive: protect Do-joon. We can't blame her for following her maternal instincts, surely?
The true horror of the story lies in its chilling representation of morbid co-dependency. The son is the Mother's creation – she controls every aspect of his being, from eating to sleeping, watching over him at the expense of her own safety, compromising both their identities. Her devotion to the ideal of devoted motherhood means sacrificing her grip on reality. So, does she deserve our pity when the chickens come home to roost? When she fights to keep Do-joon out of jail, is she convinced of his innocence or terrified at the prospect of losing the center of her existence? Do you wish that your Mom would go to those lengths for you, or pray she won't?
Mothers can be good, bad and ugly, just like everyone else. In a week when Mo'Nique has been crowned Best Supporting Actress 
because she *dared* to portray a vicious child-abuser in the superficial and simplistic Precious, Mother offers up a much more satisfying and complex critique of the pressures that come with bearing children. Precious gives us a maternal monster, and invites hisses of horror from the gallery, while Mother shows us a flawed, but empathic human being, and leaves it up to us to decide whether what she does for her son is plain old wrong, or the best thing for both of them.
Our rating (5 out of 5):
