Monday, December 9, 2013

Movie Review: Mother (Madeo) - 2009

Another great Korean movie that likely will be remade by Hollywood

IMDB "Mother" is a beautifully filmed murder mystery which has a tone to it that is hard to describe. It is dark but at times it is also light hearted. It is down to earth but sometimes surreal. Definitely, it has clever writing, great cinematography, and outstanding acting. At that, it plays in the same league with other Korean hits like "Oldboy" or "Lady Vengeance", so it's no bold guess that it will be remade by Hollywood just like those. Which is a shame since the remakes steal attention from their originals. But that is another subject. 

A girl got killed, and a young man is suspected to be the murderer. He knows he is innocent, but he is also a slow thinker and helpless without support. Police make him sign a confession that he doesn't understand. Case closed for authorities. But not for his mother. Since the police aren't interested in further investigations, she starts investigating on her own, digging into the mystery of what actually happened.

I don't want to give away more, so let's leave it at that. I was surprised to find out that director Joon-ho Bong also made "The Host", a monster movie I happened to have seen before. But although these movies seem so different at first sight, at their core they are about similar themes; about family bonds getting disrupted through external events, and about the lengths that people will go to save their loved ones.

Rating: 9 out of 10 confessions.

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