Mother

Mother (2009) is about the mother of a young man with an intellectual disability who is accused of murder. The police close the case, the lawyer cannot be bothered, and she starts looking for the truth herself. It opens like a story about maternal love and does not end there. It is among Bong Joon Ho's harshest films. Class and authority are at the centre as usual, but the question here is more personal: how far a person will go to protect someone they love. Kim Hye-ja, who plays the mother, had spent over thirty years on Korean television playing ideal mothers. Bong cast her for exactly that reason, turning everything the audience assumed about her into material. Won Bin plays her son Do-joon. It screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2009 and was submitted as South Korea's Oscar entry. It runs 129 minutes. Good for: Korean cinema, moral ambiguity, and films carried by a single performance. Less good for: the treatment of the disabled character may be uncomfortable, and there is sexual violence in the story. The opening and closing scenes are deliberately strange, and if that register is not for you the film loses you immediately.