In his last feature, The Host, director Bong Joon-ho gave the Godzilla legend a 21st century Korean makeover, conjuring a mutated creature out of the deep with the help of American-instigated environmental damage. There’s just as surely a monster lurking in the frames of his latest, though its actual form is less defined. It’s not the mother of the title, even if she is fussy, controlling, and monstrously overbearing in her love for her simple-minded son. But the source of that love — and the reasons for the sad state the pair find themselves in throughout this imaginative and thoroughly original film — is rooted in longstanding and deep-seated dysfunctions and secrets that are really the things that send a chill through the veins.
Do-Joon (Won Bin) is in his late 20s, but exists as a kind of man-child. He’s still as attached as an infant to his widowed mother Hye-ja (Kim Hye-ja). Bong manifests the idea of this baby-like reliance visually when Do-Joon climbs into bed with his mother and casually covers her breast with his hand. The fact that they share a bed at all is disturbing enough, and though the gesture seems innocent enough from these characters, the sexual overtones are difficult to get around, particularly given that Do-Joon is as hormonal as a 13-year-old boy when around women his own age.
The complexity of this relationship is never fully revealed; that might take another movie or two. Instead, the director reveals glimpses of a troubled past, and those guilt-laden secrets. This pair is as shadowed as the gorgeously dim visual palette he employs, which fits well with the noir-influenced piece the movie becomes when Do-Joon is accused of the murder of a young girl. He had seen and followed her on the night of her murder, drunk and harassing her as she walked home late at night. When she turns up dead, slumped over the edge of the roof of her building the next morning, a trail of circumstantial evidence leads to Do-Joon. He signs a confession, though later proclaims his innocence to his mother, unable to adequately explain why he signed it. He’s prone to confusion and memory loss, and his mother and his best friend Jin-tae (Jin Goo) are the only ones who seem convinced of his innocence.
