This is a corking film from Bong Joon Ho with an equally super performance from Hye-ja Kim as the "Mother". Her son "Soon Do-joon" (Won Bin) is accused of murdering a young girl. The police seem convinced of his guilt and her lawyer suggests he be detained in an hospital - rather than a prison - so she sets out, determinedly, to establish his innocence. As she takes to her task, she soon becomes obsessed, her own mental stability begins to wobble and we are drawn into a dark, almost sombre, crime thriller. It has plenty of twists and turns, and by the end (which comes pretty much from the left field) I almost felt exhausted. This is as engrossing a film as I've seen in many years, with an excellent (almost Andalusian in style) accompanying score - well worth watching. (Maybe less so if you are not so keen on acupuncture needles!)

You could say Mother is not just a murder mystery, but a tragedy mystery, and the way all the character beats and broken pieces of their circumstances come together in the third act is just flawless. It's the other side of the coin for Memories of Murder, deconstructing the assumption that the protagonist in a movie is always Where that film tackled the flawed reality of the police from their brutal methods to their leaps of logic that are just sensible enough to feel intrinsically _right_ in a crime film, this one tackles the vigilante fantasy, of fighting for your loved ones when no one else would, and the assumption that this automatically makes you right, whether logically or morally. It's an intersection of two separate but equally potent tragedies, and ho2 the circumstances of the neglected, abused and marginalized of society can end up harming each other instead of the situations that led them there. Kim Hye-ja holds your attention from the first moment she's on screen and never lets go of it, and together with an exemplary script and some fantastic directing and cinematography (especially the ending, that combines all of these elements into a perfect crescendo), Mother is another outstanding example of Bong Joon-ho's work.