Mother, South Korea’s official Best Foreign Language Film submission to the 2010 Academy Awards, is simple and understated, yet brazenly confident and assured. It is lyrical and melodic even during scenes of gut-twisting apprehension and violence. Like a mosaic made from tiny, seemingly unrelated fragments that form a discernable image only when joined together, Mother is a film made up of intimate, darkly humorous details stitched into a broader, more heartbreaking whole.

Hye-ja Kim plays a middle-aged single mom operating a small storefront where she sells medicinal herbs and illegally practices acupuncture. Her raison d’être is her 27-year-old son, Do-joon (Bin Won), a moderately mentally handicapped young man (imagine a Korean Forrest Gump) whose naïveté, carelessness and extreme dependence are a constant source of apprehension. She has done her best to protect and shelter him from the world, even if that means breeding unnatural affections.

Late one night, while walking drunk and alone down an empty city street, Do-joon encounters a teenaged school girl. The next morning, she is found with her skull crushed in and Do-joon is promptly accused of her murder. The police consider it an open and shut case and soon Do-joon is behind bars. But his mother refuses to yield to the cavalier assumptions of an apathetic police force and incompetent lawyers. She is relentless, a woman possessed, leaving no stone unturned, careless of her own wellbeing, reputation or future. She is part bloodhound, part cornered mama bear, an unlikely hero in whose demeanor there is nothing to suggest she is capable of the things she must undertake. There is nothing—nothing—she won’t do to find the murdered girl’s killer and prove her son’s innocence.

Hye-ja Kim is a model of performance in the raw. Like the character she plays, Kim’s acting is so bare and so guileless, she seems to not only be unaware that cameras are filming her every move, she seems genuinely unaware she is in a movie at all. One wonders sometimes if she is sane herself. Most of the delicious moments in a film that finds dark comedy in even the most violent places come as a result of her vibrant, yet gentle performance, a performance made all the more moving by the fact that, in her home country, she is known as an actress who plays the quintessentially perfect parent.

Joon-ho Bong, who made the critically acclaimed, old-fashioned monster movie The Host, is a supremely patient filmmaker. He never seems to be in a rush. We pay attention to the smallest, most innocuous details simply because he does. We dwell on their likely importance simply because he does. Like a mystery hiding in plain sight, Mother is not complicated or convoluted, though you will be tempted to make it so. Whether it be Bong’s commentary on class warfare, his creative camerawork, narrative detours, or the luxuriantly and believably drawn characters, Bong’s Mother is a captivating, if frustrating film. Those looking for Old Testament style justice won’t find it. Condemnation may occur, but conviction is another story entirely.

Where Mother goes in the final act is the last place you’d expect and yet only natural, the result of a dark logic. The resolution is agonizing, an unspoken arrangement of mutual ignorance based on decade’s old guilt and shame. It is an elaborate ruse, even though the only ones paying attention are the participants themselves. Mother desires, more than anything, to slip backwards in time and pretend that nothing ever happened.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Kim Hye-ja, Won Bin, Jin Goo, Yoon Jae-moon, Jun Mi-sun
Running time: 129 minutes
Rated R for bloody violence, intimations of depravity