Jordyep

7/10

Much like _Okja_, this probably has the hardest time balancing tone out of Bong Joon Ho’s entire filmography. I thought the first half was occasionally pretty messy, as it’s more overtly silly compared to something like _Parasite_ or _Memories of Murder_, which doesn’t entirely work with the dark, tense premise that’s being set-up. I also didn’t love how it plays the disability of one of the main characters for laughs, which felt slightly too unnecessarily cruel for my taste. Still, I was immediately hooked by the story that’s being told, it starts like a classic noir but then starts to subvert expectations as it goes along. Tonally it becomes more focussed, it adds more complex layers to the characters and the story takes a few interesting dramatic turns. Unfortunately, I pretty much saw everything coming in advance (there’s just something about the set-ups here that makes the turns a little too obvious), but that doesn’t mean that it stops being interesting. The grim emotion and fantastic acting by Kim Hye-ja always provide a strong backbone to what’s going on, as well as Bong Joon Ho’s firm hand behind the camera. There are a lot of memorable scenes here that are simply based on smart decisions with the writing and directing (e.g. the autopsy of the murder is hilarious, the tense scene where the mother watches the couple having sex and needs to escape from the house). The editing and cinematography are very solid, on the other hand the scoring choices aren’t great (some confusing use of horn arrangements, generic strings). Overall, it’s not exactly my favourite project from this excellent director, but still a worthwhile watch. 6.5/10

CinemaSerf

0/10

This is a corking film from Bong Joon Ho with an equally super performance from Hye-ja Kim as the "Mother". Her son "Soon Do-joon" (Won Bin) is accused of murdering a young girl. The police seem convinced of his guilt and her lawyer suggests he be detained in an hospital - rather than a prison - so she sets out, determinedly, to establish his innocence. As she takes to her task, she soon becomes obsessed, her own mental stability begins to wobble and we are drawn into a dark, almost sombre, crime thriller. It has plenty of twists and turns, and by the end (which comes pretty much from the left field) I almost felt exhausted. This is as engrossing a film as I've seen in many years, with an excellent (almost Andalusian in style) accompanying score - well worth watching. (Maybe less so if you are not so keen on acupuncture needles!)

JC230

9/10

Spoilers

You could say Mother is not just a murder mystery, but a tragedy mystery, and the way all the character beats and broken pieces of their circumstances come together in the third act is just flawless. It's the other side of the coin for Memories of Murder, deconstructing the assumption that the protagonist in a movie is always Where that film tackled the flawed reality of the police from their brutal methods to their leaps of logic that are just sensible enough to feel intrinsically _right_ in a crime film, this one tackles the vigilante fantasy, of fighting for your loved ones when no one else would, and the assumption that this automatically makes you right, whether logically or morally. It's an intersection of two separate but equally potent tragedies, and ho2 the circumstances of the neglected, abused and marginalized of society can end up harming each other instead of the situations that led them there. Kim Hye-ja holds your attention from the first moment she's on screen and never lets go of it, and together with an exemplary script and some fantastic directing and cinematography (especially the ending, that combines all of these elements into a perfect crescendo), Mother is another outstanding example of Bong Joon-ho's work.