Alright. Now we’re talking. The English-language trailer for Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother” has finally arrived.
Don’t know Bong Joon-ho? Yes, you do, he’s the South Korean auteur behind the crowd-pleasing, box office record-breaking monster movie “The Host,” and the lesser-known, but still equally good, “Zodiac”-esque mystery thriller “Memories of Murder.”
“Mother” is another mystery thriller of sorts, a Kafka-esque, Hitchock-ian procedural about a strange Oedipal relationship between a mother and her (seemingly retarded) teenage son and the insane lengths she will go to coddle and protect him. The dimwitted boy is unexpectedly arrested for a murder he didn’t commit and the matriarch seemingly goes mad and goes to the ends of the earth to prove his innocence.
Like most Joon-ho movies, it’s dark, disturbing, riotously funny in a twisted and pitch-dark manner and it’s a film we’ve been championing since we saw it in Cannes earlier this year.
In our review we wrote, ” ‘Mother’ sits well alongside Bong’s other films and acts as a sort of compromise between the absurdist fantasy elements of ‘The Host’ and the more plot-driven social-realism of ‘Memories of Murder.’ It might not be entirely flawless, but it does help solidify his status as one of the most gifted directors of his generation.”
It’s a film with an odd, creepy tone, yet unique and so damn good that U.S. producers are already said to be circling it for an English-language remake. It was on our 5 Must-See Films from the 2009 Cannes Film Festival list, and the picture already impressively beat out the more well-known Park Chan-Wook film “Thirst” to represent Korea at the Oscars this year in the Best Foreign Film category for crying out loud. Hye-ja Kim, the Korean actress who plays the obsessed Mother in the picture is terrific too.
All that and it still doesn’t have North American distribution yet. If that doesn’t change at the Toronto International Film Festival this September, we’ll just have to consider it a huge travesty. We’re not sure why someone like IFC hasn’t scooped it up yet, it’s a jewel. Do yourself a favor if you’re at TIFF and catch this one, it’s excellent. [hat tip to We Are Movie Geeks who seemed to spot this first]
