Fridae

There are genre films, and there are genre films. Take for instance the kaiju flick. There’s so much audiences can expect from them, until an outsider from another country takes on the genre. Sociology graduate Bong Joon-hoo was one such director. Transplanting the monster flick to his native country, The Host became far more subversive than any genre film from America or Japan, and shone a harsh light on the foibles of Korean society and attitudes, as well as its relations with the American hegemon. Before that, Bong also made Memories of Murder, which flouted the genre conventions of the police procedural genre to examine social prejudices and police fixing in Korea.

Returning to the murder mystery and police procedural, Mother is a continuation of Bong’s preoccupation with adapting and subverting genre films to expose the dark heart of Korean society. Here, an overprotective mother is driven to undertake her own investigations when her mentally-challenged son (played by Won Bing in a charmingly dorky mop do) becomes the prime suspect in a sloppily-conducted murder investigation by the local police force.

However, Bong is not content to revert to movies he has already made. Mother begins as one of his trademark off-centre genre films, but unlike The Host or Memories of Murder (which stayed within their genres), it grows out naturally of its genre by the half-way mark and morphs into an inspiring and sometimes dark, even grotesquely comic vision of motherly love.

While Won Bin retains his charm in his first movie after graduating from national service, the star of the show here is Kim Hye-ja, who turns her character into a force of nature to be reckoned with. Bong’s screenplay gives her room for scenery-chewing, but unlike J Michael Straczynski’s Changeling, this film takes far stranger twists and exposes more darkness even in the hearts of ordinary people.