Mother (2009 film)
Mother () is a 2009 South Korean thriller film directed by Bong Joon-ho, starring Kim Hye-ja and Won Bin. The plot follows a mother who, after her intellectually disabled son is accused of the murder of a young girl, attempts to find the true killer in order to get her son freed. The film premiered on 16 May 2009 at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, and was released in South Korea on 28 May 2009. It received critical acclaim from critics, who praised Kim's performance, the direction and screenplay, and  the film's uniqueness. Plot. An unnamed widow lives alone with her only son, selling medicinal herbs in a small town in southern South Korea while conducting unlicensed acupuncture treatments for the town's women on the side. Her son, Yoon Do-joon, is shy, but prone to attacking anyone who mocks his intellectual disability. She dotes on him and scolds him for hanging out with Jin-tae, a local thug. When Do-joon is nearly hit by a car, he and Jin-tae vandalize the car and attack the driver and passengers as revenge. Jin-tae blames Do-joon  for the damage done to the car, and Do-joon is sued. His mother struggles with the burden of the debt. On his way home from a bar late at night, Do-joon sees a high school girl named Moon Ah-jung walking alone and follows her to an abandoned building. The next morning, she is discovered dead on the rooftop, shocking the town and pressuring the incompetent police to find the killer. Only circumstantial evidence places Do-joon near the scene of the crime, but the police arrest the boy anyway. He is tricked into signing a confession and  faces a long prison sentence. His mother, believing him innocent, tries to prove he is not the murderer. However, she is unsuccessful, as the lawyer she hires is self-absorbed and unhelpful and the community unanimously blames Do-joon for the crime. The mother suspects Jin-tae of committing the murder and breaks into his house to look for evidence. She takes a golf club, which she believes has blood on it, but when she turns it over to the police and Jin-tae is confronted about it, it becomes clear that the "blood" is just smeared lipstick. Despite her  accusation, Jin-tae agrees to help the mother solve the casefor a fee. The mother fires her lawyer and questions the people in town about Ah-jung. They tell her the girl was sexually promiscuous and in a relationship with a boy known as Jong-pal, who had escaped a sanatorium. Do-joon attacks another prisoner who calls him "retard". On one of his mother's prison visits, Do-joon recalls a memory of her attempt to kill him and then herself when he was five by lacing their drinks with a pesticide. She tries to apologize, saying she wanted  to free them both from hardship. She offers to remove his pain by using her unique knowledge of an acupuncture point that erases bad memories, but he tells her he never wants to see her again. The mother learns from a camera-shop worker that Ah-jung had frequent nosebleeds and had pictures on her cellphone that she wanted to have printed. Ah-jung's friend is attacked by two young men who are looking for the phone, but the mother rescues her and then pays Jin-tae to interrogate the men, who claim that Ah-jung accepted rice in  exchange for sex (and was nicknamed "the rice cake girl"). They say she used her phone to secretly take pictures of her partners, thus making it a potential tool for blackmailing. The mother tracks down the phone, which is hidden at Ah-jung's grandmother's house. Do-joon remembers seeing an elderly man in the abandoned building on the night of Ah-jung's death and identifies him in one of the pictures on Ah-jung's phone. The mother recognizes the man as a junk collector she once bought an umbrella from and goes to his home to  find out what he saw, on the pretense of offering him charity medical services. The junk collector reveals that he has been troubled since he saw Do-joon kill Ah-jung. He witnessed the two have a short conversation, during which Ah-jung called Do-joon a "retard", and Do-joon then threw a large rock into the shadows in which Ah-jung was standing, hitting her in the head and inadvertently killing her. Do-joon then dragged her to the rooftop. The mother is unable to accept the truth. She frantically tells the junk collector that he is wrong  and the case is going to be reopened and Do-joon will be released, which prompts him to pick up the phone to finally report what he had seen to the police. Fearing for her son, the mother bludgeons the junk collector with a wrench and sets fire to his house. Later, the police tell the mother that they have found the "real" killer: Jong-pal, who is being presumed guilty after Ah-jung's blood was found on his shirt. The police assume it got there during the murder, but the mother knows Jong-pal's story, that the  blood is the result of Ah-jung's nose bleeding during consensual sex, is true. Feeling guilty, she visits Jong-pal, who is even more intellectually disabled than her son, and cries for him when she hears he does not have a mother to fight for him, knowing he is going to jail for a crime he did not commit. Do-joon is freed from prison and Jin-tae picks him up. They pass the junk collector's burned-down house on the way home and stop to pick through the rubble. During dinner, Do-joon muses to his mother  that Jong-pal probably dragged Ah-jung up to the roof so that someone would see she was hurt and help her. As the mother is about to depart from a bus station on a "Thank-You Parents" tour, Do-joon returns her acupuncture kit, which he found in the remains of the junk collector's house, and tells her to be more careful. She tearfully walks away, jarred by his discovery. On the bus, she sits in shock before placing one of the acupuncture needles in the point that erases bad memories. She stands up and dances with the  other passengers. Release. "Mother" competed in the Un Certain Regard category at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. In South Korea, it attracted 3,003,785 admissions nationwide and grossed a total of , becoming the 6th most-attended domestic film of 2009, and 10th overall. The film had its U.S. premiere in February 2010 as part of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and it received a limited U.S. theatrical release by Magnolia Pictures in March 2010. In March 2015, the film was re-released in the US at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, as part of their Bong  Joon-ho Retrospective (along with "Memories of Murder", "The Host", and "Snowpiercer"). A black-and-white version of the film was released in 2013. The film was reported to have been made with a $5 million budget and went on to be the sixth highest grossing film in South Korea in 2009. Critical response. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 96% based on 114 reviews, with an average rating of 7.88/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "As fleshy as it is funny, Bong Joon-Ho's "Mother" straddles family drama, horror  and comedy with a deft grasp of tone and plenty of eerie visuals." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 79 out of 100 based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews." Manohla Dargis of "The New York Times" praised the performance by Kim Hye-ja and described the film as "alternately dazzling and frustrating". "Mother" appeared on many film critics' "best-of" lists of 2010. Awards and nominations. The film was selected as South Korea's official submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the  82nd Academy Awards.