Nominated for 6 Asian Film Awards and for Best Foreign Language Film at the Independent Spirit Awards. Many critics felt Hye-ja Kim delivered one of the best performances of the year. Andrew O’Hehir at Salon says Bong Joon-ho’s Mother is “a slippery, marvelously crafted drama that suggests the psychological thrillers of Hitchcock or Henri-Georges Clouzot transposed to present-day Korea..”
At the core of “Mother” is the complicated relationship between a simple, perhaps mildly disabled young man named Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) and his unnamed mother (played by Korean TV legend Kim Hye-ja), the widowed proprietor of a small flower shop. Both actors were previously unknown to me, but even as the plot of “Mother” spirals from normal domestic drama into nightmare, they portray the haunted nuance of the mother-son bond with extraordinary complexity and compassion. Do-joon’s mother has grown prematurely old with worry, literally tormented by the thought that something terrible could befall him. (And so, of course, it does.)
But Bong is pushing past the constraints of the genre into claustrophobic psychological portraiture: Kim’s increasingly disheveled and obsessive character is both hero and monster, protector and destroyer. She is driven by the most basic of human emotions — a parent’s unconditional love for her child — and also blinded by it, to the point that she barely notices her own amoral and ruthless behavior.