Mother Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

Mother Blu-ray Movie Review

As Norman Bates and Do-joon know, a mother is a boy’s best friend…

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater July 20, 2010

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s previous film, The Host—a family drama/social satire/monster movie mash-up—is utterly bereft of mothers. There’s a single father, a widowed granddad, some siblings, aunts, and uncles, but no mom. His new movie, Madeo—or, yes, Mother, spelled phonetically in Korean—goes the opposite direction: it has the mother to end all mothers, an archetypal overbearing mom who would do anything to save her son. Both films are about parents circumventing the law to rescue a child—and the lengths to which they’d go to do so—but Mother is the more mature and affecting of the two. While The Host reinvigorated the monster-amok genre—pointing a few fingers at the Korean and American governments in the process—in Mother, Bong Joon-ho crafts a murder mystery that has Hitchcockian suspense and the eerie, unsettling, almost surreal quality of an early Polanski film.

Mother

There’s a little bit of Blue Velvet-era Lynch in here as well, dark comedy mixed with small- town, just-beneath-the-surface horror. In the opening scene, the unnamed Mother (Kim Hye-ja) walks through a field of wild wheat toward the camera. Mist hangs in the air behind her and wind hushes us from all sides. The tone is oddly menacing, as if some act of violence had just been, or was about to be, committed. Suddenly, with a shift in the score to flamenco guitar, she sways, lifts her arms, and dances—just dances—her face vacant of all emotion. It’s funny and more than a little odd, a non sequitur that won’t make sense until later.

In the next sequence, Joon-ho shows his grasp of mise-en-scène, using the framing of his shots to show instantly what it would take minutes to say in exposition. Mother is kneeling in the back of the herbalist shop where she works, chopping some sort of grain with an enormous paper cutter. The shop is dark, but a shaft of light falls through the open door to where she’s sitting, creating a kind of tunnel vision. And through the door, across the street, at the end of this tunnel of light, we see the sole focus of Mother’s life—her son Do-joon (Won Bin), a 27-year-old with the mind of a child, like Benjy from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. As Joon-ho’s camera intercuts between the thwacking crunch of the paper cutter, Do-joon fooling around outside, and Mother’s eyes trained on her son’s every movement, the absent-minded mom’s fingers get closer and closer to the blade. At the height of the tension, a Mercedes Benz plows through the street, knocking Do-joon over and causing Mother to cut herself. She runs over, pat-checks her son to see if he’s okay, and ends up smearing blood all over him. She’s so concerned for Do-joon that she doesn’t realize the blood is her own. And this tells us everything we need to know about their relationship.

Later, Do-joon is out drinking at mom-and-pop bar, and he comments on the prettiness of the legs of the proprietress’ teenaged daughter. It’s clear he has sexual thoughts, but he doesn’t know what to make of them. He doesn’t even understand what’s so funny when he admits that he “sleeps with” his mother—he just means that they actually sleep side by side in a single bed. (Although their relationship does nearly border on emotional incestuousness.) On his way home, he follows a high school girl up a trail until she disappears into an abandoned building. He’s not leering, though, he’s just curious. The next morning, the girl is found bludgeoned to death, hanging halfway over the roof’s railing, as if on display to the town below. A witness puts Do-joon at the scene of the crime, and he’s arrested by the town’s overzealous cops, who haven’t had a murder case in who knows how long. Committed to proving her son’s innocence, Mother mounts her own investigation, hiring—and firing—lawyers, probing her forgetful son for details, and sleuthing around town asking questions, her methods growing increasingly more dubious morally.

The thrust of the film is Mother’s transformation from worrywart mom to completely pissed off, utterly conflicted she-bear, a monster of her own making. Actress Kim Hye-ja has long played matronly roles in Korean film and television—usually as the doting, thoroughly “proper” mom—but here she gets to explore the primal, protective instincts that make up the darker side of motherhood. Her bravura performance is ragged and trembling as she plays a demure woman caught between cultural etiquette and the desire to get at the truth by any means necessary. In one scene, she sneaks into the house of Jin-tae (Jin Goo), her son’s “rotten apple” friend and a potential suspect, to look for clues. Much like Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, she’s forced to hide in a closet when Jin-tae comes home with his girlfriend. As the two make love, Mother watches, lowers her eyes in embarrassment, and then peeks again, her gaze steadier this time. As Do-joon’s situation grows direr, Mother sheds the lifelong accumulated weaknesses of self- deprecation and rigid adherence to social norms, but her newfound capabilities come with a cost. Ultimately—and this will make sense if you see the film, and you should—Mother is about the necessity and agony of memory, about how forgetting what you’ve done doesn’t erase the fact that it happened.

Mystery films are inherently built around withheld information, and Bong Joon-ho holds back like a pro, carefully doling out clues that cleverly shift our perception of Do-joon, Mother, and the murder of the young girl. To say more about the plot would ruin the slowly pulled back curtain of the reveal, but even after all the puzzle pieces finally fall neatly into place—and yes, the resultant picture is devastating—the film still shimmers with emotional complexity. You could say that Mother is just a classic whodunit—and you wouldn’t be wrong—but there’s more to it than that. As with all of Bong Joon-ho’s films, Mother’s story floats on an undercurrent of social satire, from the rich university professors who pull a hit-and-run on Do-joon at the beginning of the film, to corrupt lawyers, apathetic cops, and even Mother herself, a commentary on so-called “helicopter moms” who hover incessantly over their children.

Mother Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Blu-ray.com staff writer Dr. Svet Atanasov previously reviewed the South Korean release of Mother—by distributor CJ Entertainment—and if you check out the screenshots from his review for comparison, you'll notice that Magnolia Home Entertainment's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer is slightly different. The CJ Entertainment release is somewhat darker, with punchier contrast, but it's hard to say which version is most accurate. Regardless, Magnolia's treatment of Mother is excellent. From the opening scene of Mother standing in the wheat field, there's a palpable sense of depth and presence, traits that continue throughout the film. The cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo (Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War) is simply beautiful, and the film's colors have a creamy quality, softened but well-saturated. In terms of clarity, the image is crisp and defined—fine detail is easily visible—and there's a thin layer of untouched grain that gives the picture a warm, filmic texture. If I have one complaint—and it's a small one—it's that black levels typically hover in a dark grayish range. (As a plus, though, this means more detail is visible in the shadows, so it evens out I suppose.) Image manipulations like DNR and edge enhancement are wholly absent, and I didn't spot any errant compression problems. Overall, I was really pleased with the look of the film.

Mother Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The sole audio offering on Magnolia's release of Mother is a Korean DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track. While no room-shaker or wall-rattler, the mix offers up some eerie, mood-establishing atmospherics that really help sell the tone of the film. Airy ambience and wind fill the soundfield, rain and thunder storm in the rears, a lonely dog barks in the distance, fire ripples outward, and cars roar ominously between channels. One particular effect—the crisp crunch of the paper cutter that Mother uses to chop her herbs—is one of the best tension-ratcheting sounds I've heard in awhile, and it'll definitely entrench itself in your brain. Much of the audio has a quiet, haunting quality; it's never bombastic or jarring—except perhaps during the car crash scene—but it is incredibly effective. The full- bodied score by Lee Byung-woo is evocative and emotional, filled with clean flamenco guitar, aching strings, and bright horns. (It reminded me a bit of the music from the Korean horror film A Tale of Two Sisters.) Dialogue seems perfectly balanced in the mix, and English, English SDH, and Spanish subtitles are available in easy-to-read white lettering that appears inside the 2.35:1 frame.

Mother Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

With the exception of a commentary track, Magnolia has ported over all of the supplements from the Korean version of the film to this U.S. Blu-ray release, complete with English subtitles. First up is Making of Mother (SD, 1:30:35), a comprehensive—some might say exhaustive— documentary that covers just about every element of the film's production. And yet there's still more to say in individual featurettes for Music Score (SD, 15:17), Supporting Actors (SD, 14:33), Cinematography (SD, 9:12), and Production Design (SD, 11:48). Lastly, wrapping up the main supplements, we have A Look at Actress Kim Hye-ja (SD, 9:23), and Behind the Scenes (SD, 6:51), a compilation of rehearsal footage and actor interviews. The disc also includes two International Trailers (SD, 1:15 and 1:39), trailers for The Warlords, The Eclipse, Survival of the Dead, Ondine, and a promo for HDNet (1080p, 8:42 total). That's over two and a half hours of bonus material!

Mother Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm a big fan of The Host, but I was somewhat worried that director Bong Joon-ho would continue in that vein—that is, big summer blockbuster-type films. After seeing his entry in the Tokyo! anthology, though, and now, Mother, my doubts have been erased. Mother is arguably his best film to date, a mature, intelligent, character-driven mystery with a plot that branches in unexpected directions. (And it was still a blockbuster in Korea!) It's an emotional sucker-punch, yes, but it's also deeply, darkly funny, a trait that's often overlooked in Bong Joon-ho's films. Magnolia has also done a terrific job with this release; it sounds great, looks fantastic— if a little different from the South Korean CJ Entertainment version—and features over two and a half hours of English-subtitled special features. Highly recommended.