Mother

Directed by Joon-ho Bong, Mother follows Hye-ja Kim’s title character as she’s forced to go to impossible lengths after her mentally-handicapped son (Won Bin’s Yoon Do-joon) is accused of murder. There’s little doubt that Mother improves considerably as it progresses, as the film, written by Eun-kyo Park and Bong, suffers from an often excruciatingly underwhelming and uninvolving opening hour that contains few, if any, elements designed to hold the viewer’s interest and attention – with Bong exacerbating the unreasonably deliberate pace by stressing sequences and subplot of a hopelessly tedious nature. (It’s difficult, certainly, to see the value in everything involving an incompetent and ambivalent lawyer, for example.) The picture’s less-than-compelling atmosphere, which is at least alleviated by Kim’s stirring turn as the tenacious protagonist, persists right up until around the halfway mark, after which point Mother, spurred on by an investigation that admittedly grows more and more engrossing, slowly-but-surely adopts an unexpectedly captivating vibe that’s capped off with a riveting and completely satisfying third act. The final result is a disappointingly erratic endeavor that could (and should) have topped out at around 90 minutes, and yet that second half is so enthralling and so rewarding that it becomes easy enough to forgive the movie’s decidedly rough-around-the-edges feel.

*** out of ****