Mother (2009)
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
A mother lives quietly with her son. One day, a girl is brutally killed, and the boy is charged with the murder. Now, it's his mother's mission to prove him innocent.
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6 films that influenced Mother
What critics say influenced Mother
Rather, it’s a murky fusion of parent and peer reminiscent of Roy and Lilly Dillon in The Grifters.
The movie is built around a tour-de-force performance by Kim Hye-ja, whose monstrously devoted mama takes her place next to her sisters in Psycho and Mommie Dearest, albeit for entirely different reasons.
Though father are no slouches in this department, the thriller and horror genres have always taken a special shine to mothers, from Psycho to Carrie to Friday the 13th.
The specter of Psycho haunts Bong’s film.
With The Host, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho unpacked the cultural and geopolitical baggage of the atomic monster movie; this follow-up (2009) takes on the fractured Freudianism of Hitchcock's Psycho.
Bong handles the genre shift with finesse as he returns to territory covered in his "Memories of Murder" (2003).
As in Bong's police procedural Memories of Murder (2003), the investigation plot opens out into a satirical panorama of a society where alcoholism, abuse and ill-feeling appear to be the norm.
Bong Joon-ho firmly solidifies his place as one of the world's best filmmakers with the excellent Mother (Madeo), a film that would stand as the best in the career of most young filmmakers but faces stiff competition from the Korean director's amazing Memories of Murder and fantastic The Host , two films I considered for my “ The 50 Best of the 2000s ” feature.
Bong Joon-ho nominally returns to the scene of Memories of Murder’s crime with Mother, re-immersing himself in a small-town community teeming with quirky lowlifes and deep dark secrets, and shaken by a sexually motivated murder.
Fellow Korean auteur Park Chan-wook would have wrung the Grand Guignol hell out of this plot, but Bong, back in Memories of Murder terrain, is less interested in shocks than in the synergy between the country's vast fields and the equally mysterious inner landscape of the dazed matriarch making her way across them.
South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho loves to color outside the lines: In Memories of Murder, he balanced a bleak police procedural with unexpected, sometimes uproarious humor (imagine David Fincher's Zodiac crossed with The Odd Couple).
Perversely, Bong views the character's escalating feelings through a filter of mordant irony, analyzing passion without sharing it; imagine watching Stella Dallas through a thick, bulletproof windshield, and you get a sense of the film's removed stance.
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"Mother" is popular director Bong Joon-ho's follow-up to "The Host" (2006), in which a giant mutant tadpole terrorizes Seoul, taking a plucky girl hostage in the sewer pipes beneath the city.
To this point, Bong's biggest big-screen success was with 2006's horror-drama "The Host," which is being remade for American audiences by Rogue Pictures.
My familiarity with Bong’s work only extends to The Host (2006), which I thought was wildly overrated, and his episode of Tokyo!
This is a new South Korean film by Bong Joon-ho , his first after "The Host" (2006).
In 2006, director Bong Joon-ho brought “The Host” to the world stage.
Though with Mother, he strays from the popular horror fantasies on view in 2006âs The Host, the filmmaker retains a rare ability to straddle several narrative tones simultaneously, without compromising or diluting any of them.
Now if only someone in New York will release his feature debut, the biting black comedy "Barking Dogs Never Bite" (2001).