adi-justadi The Directing, Acting, BGM, everything is top notch in this movie. It's constantly engaging. Masterclass. But for one thing, I couldn't really get myself into the movie. It's the mother. I'm interested in psychology and I studied about the Oedipus complex. This mother is too possessive of her child that she spoiled him and turned him into an idiot. She takes too much care of him. So much that she does everything for him. He is trying to come out of her clutches, but finds the comfort zone too tough to leave. Definitely his mistake too. But as I watched the movie, I grew more and more angry with the mother. She never for once taught him how to live. He is trying to protect him in each and every part of his life. That only leads to a stunted development of the son. Mothers like this look like angels, but they are the curse for men.

Imdbidia Wow, what a movie, and what a story! Nothing that Hollywood producers and directors would dare to do. And a long leap and change of pace after the director's previous movie Host.Mother revolves about the investigation carried out by a loving mother to prove the innocence of her mentally-challenged and psychologically-unstable son, who is is jailed for the murder of a teenage girl.Mother is a sad movie. I don't see the comic side as other viewers do. It looks depressing, it is depressing, and has a shocking ending. All the characters lack love, they have gray miserable lives that lead nowhere, they are unable to connect with other human beings in healthy ways despite living in a small town. They seem to have lost their soul somewhere. However, the good performances and the way the director Joon-ho Bong approaches the story, produces a thought-provoking slow-burning psychological thriller with a shocking ending that will make you forget how sad everything is. The biggest lesson you will remind yourself of after watching this movie is that the director makes the movie, not the story or the actors, Joon-ho gives a master lesson of what direction is in Mother.Two main themes are explored in the movie. The first one is that the way we look at the world is filtered by our color lenses, whatever those might be, and the color we see is nothing but a distortion of reality; however, those lenses can be put onto us, to manipulate our view of the world so we see that clearly when we remove them. That is, exactly, what the director does here. We are the mother's eyes until the director comes, knocks on our door and tell us, hey give me those lenses, they are mine. We look at the world and assume things and, truly we know nothing. That is why the movie has two circular anchors; the first anchor is the film opening scene with the mother dancing in a field of grass; the second anchor is almost the same scene but, by then, we have the lenses off, and so does she.The second main theme is clear from the very title - The Mother. The mother we are presented with in this film is not just Do-joon's mother. Most of the comments, scenes and attitudes shown by the character clearly relate to the Archetype of the Great Mother. The archetype relates not only to the relationship that we all have with our mothers, but it is also a repository of values and behaviors we have in our psyche about motherhood in general, in humans and in Nature. Some of the positive traits associated to the Mother Archetype are the power of healing, being a source of nourishment and fertility, being a promoter of personal development and, finally of the independence from her offspring; she is the goddess, the peacemaker, the balance. The negative traits of the mother are her overbearing and controlling nature, her unhealthy attachment to her offspring, her destructive and excessive nature; she is the witch, the mad woman, destruction, the unbalance. Just to show two examples we see the obsession of the mother with the fertility powers or manhood of her son, and she is also a healer (a herbalist and acupuncturist) who works on fertility issues and on healing people. Most of the traits I've mentioned above appear clearly in the character of the mother.The acting is good, contained but believable. Hye-ja Kim is fantastic as Mother, showing different aspects of her character's psyche without crossing the line, i.e. she's not overly dramatic or overly rigid she feels real, with her virtues and defects, ups and downs. Won Bin is also believable as the infantile "retarded" son who doesn't grasp the world.Two things I didn't like in the movie. The first thing is that the movie is a bit too long unnecessarily, with many superficial scenes that add nothing to the character or the story; they are mostly in the first hour of the film. Therefore, the pace and tempo of the movie are uneven, and the film is not as engaging as it could have been. I do love slow burning thrillers, but if something burns for too long, you get ashes. The second thing is the production: the movie looks cheap, as it was set in the 1990s, with a poor cinematography and film quality. I thought if those things had been a bit more artistic, the movie would have been terrific.Overall a really good movie, with a great story and ending, but a bit too long.

Johan Dondokambey The story is a very nice example of how a movie screenplay and direction can be designed very well to play on audiences' precedents and turn them all around at a very quick instance. I really like how the movie kind of opens up with a shocking sequence that really summarized all the important characters in it. And as all Boon Joong Ho works, this movie is also not excluded of his depictions of gruesome things, although they don't really cross the line of being overly graphic. I like how the movie's opening scene seems like it's ts ending and then all those twists and turns just keeps rushing in. I even thought that there is still another twist to it when Do Joon chats about why the body is put on a high place. The acting really focuses on Kim Hye Ja and Won Bin's acting works. But in overall the acting looks very nice. Kim Hye Ja kept the constant expression of a sorrowful mother that doesn't stop for anything very well. Won Bin also acted out well as an idiot that has his responses almost like they are programmed in him.

chaos-rampant So we want films that challenge, engage, but don't waste the engagement on a trifle gasp. It's easy to unsettle, a murder or rape; the real challenge is what next? How do you open us up? This one's a great example, but you'll have to wait for the last scene. A few things are first established before the crucial crime. A hit- and- run introduces random agency in a world where violence can swoop down from nowhere and wreck lives. The altercation with the broken car mirror is for us to understand that the savant boy is an unreliable narrator, susceptible to stories. And his relationship with the mother is portrayed to teeter between the merely awkward and the unacceptable, so that we first have to struggle with our own selves before we can empathize with either.And then it becomes about us. How we are susceptible to stories, unreliable narrators of what we witness. How empathy is a matter of inheriting a story as though it was our own child in it, going on faith. Do we believe the guileless boy as his mother does? Do we trust that he remembers when he does? Our own visual testimony? It is about us having to struggle to empathize. About us, having empathized, being uncertain of the judgement. This is a hard earned empathy, not Spielberg's mushy one where cute lost boys face obvious evil, evil here being the inability to even know about it. — it's really vital to realize that the boy's original impression of the crucial scene is his own 'real' subsequent memory of it, the event having been reconfigured into view in just the way we first see it. It confuses because that is what he recalls having happened, he's not lying. — the important discovery of the victim's cell phone leads to a story that trickles to the mother through three levels of narrators, the victim inside a (stoned) boy's memory being told to a third person. The phone itself is full of pictures of men, each one potentially the culprit. — later in the film there is a reconstruction of the original scene of the murder, as the savant finally remembers a man in the house, and this man is later found and gives his own testimony. This is so good it's worthy of the photo reconstruction scene in Bladerunner. — this recalling is marvelously framed through windows and unclean glass. At its most pure, the film is this glimpse through hazy glass at a troubled boy trying to remember, it's about moving walls around to create that space where something horrible happened. — the film begins with an image of the mother, at that point simply she's just a middle-aged woman to us, inexplicably dancing in a field. In the end we know at what point in the story this takes place but the gesture remains wonderfully ambiguous. Which brings me to the last scene. The whole film is meant to appeal to a broad audience, though it presents by no means simple and uncomplicated truths. But the last scene is one of the most striking I have seen. Great cinema begins where drama and metaphor end, it's hard to describe what that next step is, in short we'd say transcendent. The context of narrative is always illusory, it is the opportunity for us to be aware in a certain sense. This is why it doesn't matter what's the answer to the mystery in Blowup, or why the hayloft barn ablaze in Zerkalo is not encountered as the result of any logical causation.In the last scene we have that step beyond causation into ambiguous air. The mother has been sent off in a bus with other middle-aged people. She prickles her knee with her acupuncturist's needle, hitting that spot "that eases the heart". See what happens in the film. What is the urge that lifts everyone from their seat? There's a lot of great Asian cinema I'm being exposed to lately, and that scene is the third most captivating in an Asian film of the decade I've seen, all three involving physical activity of some sort as transcendence, two of them dancing. Find my second favorite in Sharasojyu.