"Bong Joon-ho’s Mother begins with a strange slow dance performed by an unnamed middle-aged woman (Kim Hye-ja), an improvised solitary glide up a grassy knoll. But this fleeting bout of inspiration cuts to a dire sight: A dimly lit medium shot of the dancer now shrouded in darkness, eyes staring deeply into the camera. This stark juxtaposition foreshadows a lengthy timeline of suffering where repressed memories breed new traumas, forming an intricate procedural full of devastating delusions.
When her handicapped son Yoon Do-joon (Bin Won) is accused of murder, Mother goes to great lengths to prove him innocent, yet her investigation unearths hidden skeletons. This maternal spider weaves her web with unconditional love, and this is what defines her relationship with her son and both characters’ skewed perspective. In Mother, time and doubt erodes all sense of self and the truth only makes matters worse. This makes Mother a distant cousin of Memories of Murder, Bong’s masterpiece about the failure of state institutions to conquer evil. But where that film oozes with genre subversion, Mother turns into a singular exploration of pain, peeling away layers of mania to reveal the heartache underneath." - Glenn Heath Jr.
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