Fella_shibby Was looking forward to this film after enjoying the director's earlier films, Memories of murder, The host n Snowpiercer. The film is about a mentally challenged kid who is also being overprotected by his single mother who is a specialist in herbs n acupuncture. The kid is arrested n charged with the murder of a young girl but the mother believes he is innocent n she goes out to prove his innocence. The best part about this film is the acting by the lady who played the mother. Another good aspect is the details. When the dead body of the girl is kept on the terrace of a dilapidated house for the whole town to see, we as viewers really wants to know the reason n the reason is explained towards the end well suiting. The direction n cinematography were brilliant. The only problem was the editing. Found it to be a bit slow n long.

punishmentpark 'Gwoemul', by the same director as 'Madeo', was one of the best monster movies I have ever seen (although it's a been a few years), his 'Memories of murder' was a terrific thriller, and 'Barking dogs never bite' was a pretty good drama. And so I have been anticipating this one rather eagerly for quite a while.It's certainly not a bad movie, but somehow it disappointed me a little. Maybe it has to do with the mother, who remains elusive at all times, even if the title already gives away how as to we should look at her, and that it simply indicates who the main character is / should be.The other points of view, through the son's eyes and several other supporting ones, and the fact that the story plays with the facts of a gruesome murder case, demand a lot of attention as well, which takes away some of the focus on the most important character: mom.These are just some ideas that I have about why I feel that this is my least favorite Joon Ho Bong movie, but it may very well be a more intuitive thing for me, also. The movie and story simply didn't grab me as much as, especially, 'Gwoemul' and 'Memories and murder' did. It felt dragged out too long and was too depressing maybe, even for me.A good 6 out of 10 it deserves nonetheless, at the least (fine acting, cinematography). And maybe I'll try it again some day.

Johan Dondokambey The story is a very nice example of how a movie screenplay and direction can be designed very well to play on audiences' precedents and turn them all around at a very quick instance. I really like how the movie kind of opens up with a shocking sequence that really summarized all the important characters in it. And as all Boon Joong Ho works, this movie is also not excluded of his depictions of gruesome things, although they don't really cross the line of being overly graphic. I like how the movie's opening scene seems like it's ts ending and then all those twists and turns just keeps rushing in. I even thought that there is still another twist to it when Do Joon chats about why the body is put on a high place. The acting really focuses on Kim Hye Ja and Won Bin's acting works. But in overall the acting looks very nice. Kim Hye Ja kept the constant expression of a sorrowful mother that doesn't stop for anything very well. Won Bin also acted out well as an idiot that has his responses almost like they are programmed in him.

chaos-rampant So we want films that challenge, engage, but don't waste the engagement on a trifle gasp. It's easy to unsettle, a murder or rape; the real challenge is what next? How do you open us up? This one's a great example, but you'll have to wait for the last scene. A few things are first established before the crucial crime. A hit- and- run introduces random agency in a world where violence can swoop down from nowhere and wreck lives. The altercation with the broken car mirror is for us to understand that the savant boy is an unreliable narrator, susceptible to stories. And his relationship with the mother is portrayed to teeter between the merely awkward and the unacceptable, so that we first have to struggle with our own selves before we can empathize with either.And then it becomes about us. How we are susceptible to stories, unreliable narrators of what we witness. How empathy is a matter of inheriting a story as though it was our own child in it, going on faith. Do we believe the guileless boy as his mother does? Do we trust that he remembers when he does? Our own visual testimony? It is about us having to struggle to empathize. About us, having empathized, being uncertain of the judgement. This is a hard earned empathy, not Spielberg's mushy one where cute lost boys face obvious evil, evil here being the inability to even know about it. — it's really vital to realize that the boy's original impression of the crucial scene is his own 'real' subsequent memory of it, the event having been reconfigured into view in just the way we first see it. It confuses because that is what he recalls having happened, he's not lying. — the important discovery of the victim's cell phone leads to a story that trickles to the mother through three levels of narrators, the victim inside a (stoned) boy's memory being told to a third person. The phone itself is full of pictures of men, each one potentially the culprit. — later in the film there is a reconstruction of the original scene of the murder, as the savant finally remembers a man in the house, and this man is later found and gives his own testimony. This is so good it's worthy of the photo reconstruction scene in Bladerunner. — this recalling is marvelously framed through windows and unclean glass. At its most pure, the film is this glimpse through hazy glass at a troubled boy trying to remember, it's about moving walls around to create that space where something horrible happened. — the film begins with an image of the mother, at that point simply she's just a middle-aged woman to us, inexplicably dancing in a field. In the end we know at what point in the story this takes place but the gesture remains wonderfully ambiguous. Which brings me to the last scene. The whole film is meant to appeal to a broad audience, though it presents by no means simple and uncomplicated truths. But the last scene is one of the most striking I have seen. Great cinema begins where drama and metaphor end, it's hard to describe what that next step is, in short we'd say transcendent. The context of narrative is always illusory, it is the opportunity for us to be aware in a certain sense. This is why it doesn't matter what's the answer to the mystery in Blowup, or why the hayloft barn ablaze in Zerkalo is not encountered as the result of any logical causation.In the last scene we have that step beyond causation into ambiguous air. The mother has been sent off in a bus with other middle-aged people. She prickles her knee with her acupuncturist's needle, hitting that spot "that eases the heart". See what happens in the film. What is the urge that lifts everyone from their seat? There's a lot of great Asian cinema I'm being exposed to lately, and that scene is the third most captivating in an Asian film of the decade I've seen, all three involving physical activity of some sort as transcendence, two of them dancing. Find my second favorite in Sharasojyu.