What’s the magic word for the conjuring up such a mother as this? The mother in Bong Jun-ho’s film shows the private obsession and social constructions which permit the emergence of a protective, monstrous and nameless mother. Hye-Ja Kim, playing the eponymous character, is a national mother character in South Korea (having played the mother in ‘Country Diary (전원일기)’ for several decades, coming to be an iconic ideal mother-figure in South Korea. She loves her children and her grand-children; she is a wise wife, and a self-sacrificing daughter-in-law, who cares for an elder with Alzheimer’s disease. In the drama, she plays a calm persona, mending broken clothes by sewing, or by contributing to work in the farm, growing rice and vegetables. That sacrificing, wise, calm and dedicated character is the ideal mother, and indeed a common mother figure in South Korea, along with most Asian countries influenced by Confucian ethics.

In this film however, the mother cuts dried plants to make fake medicine with. The heavy cutter cuts her fingers in a very early scene. That rusty cutter appears again after all the crimes, detectives and murder scenes have happened in the film. The camera shows the hands of the mother, and she sees unbearable sin there. The audience immediately associates those hands with the cutter when she cuts the dry stems again. She already has already shown us the grotesque lengths she is prepared to go to, more than enough to cut her body. That tension of the moment, whether she is going to hurt herself or not, maintains whole film. She doesn’t look strong enough to go through all the cruelties of abandonment by society, and endure the ignorance of those outside a social minority. She was an unfortunate single mother, who ended up with a son who has severe learning difficulties. Society doesn’t know the name of the mother. They don’t know the mental difficulties of the son. They use this ignorance to place blame for what happened.

There is bleak comedy in the wisest person in the whole film being the corrupted lawyer who suggests four years of mental hospital confinement for her son. He looked like a selfish prick, but he surprisingly suggests a good solution for the mother, even though at the time he is accompanied by (probably) under-aged women in prostitution, and drunken senior doctors and prosecutors who can spin the case through the system for her. When the audience finds out that the murder was actually her son’s responsibility, it reminds us that her best bet was to go with that lawyer’s idea.

The film shows more than that. The story creates a third victim instead. The mother insists on meeting that replaced victim, partly because she wants to know who she is going to owe. It turns out the third victim has Down’s Syndrome. We know. She knows. But nobody in the film has mentioned or recognized this, because it is the untold story, taboo in this society. The mother asks the young man a question: ‘Do you have a parent? Don’t you have your mother?’ That is the punch-line of the film. The mother of the third victim would go through a similar journey as Hye-Ja (the Mother of the title) did. We can imagine the mother of the man with Down’s Syndrome probably left him because she knew how difficult it could be to go through with life, in a world where nobody gives any support, extra care, recognition of help, or understanding of their condition. Hye-Ja saw that chain of cruelty and trembled for him.

It is a visceral film. Hye-Ja’s exquisite and mad performance convinces us that being the mother of a retarded son is an emotionally and physically demanding job. The film disturbingly hinted that the mother and son have a sexual connection, probably a trivial thing compared to murdering other human-being for her son. The film makes our knowledge indistinct; what we know and what the director intends for us to know. Soon, we realize we have all been responsible for not seeing vulnerability in society, and left all of it to ‘the mothers’.

Overall, the retarded son is the smartest one. He remembers what happened when he was five- his mother tried to kill him because of the burden of caring for him. He knows how to protect himself if anybody tries to hurt him. He picked up the acupuncture needle box from the ashes and gave it to his mother saying, ‘you should be careful not to leave something like this’, as if he knows everything. He knows how and what to eat at the meal table. He will probably be fine after his mother is gone. I was glad that the actor didn’t over-do the ‘retarded’ characteristics.

Showing the inside of her thigh and puncturing the skin with a sharp needle on the bus, brings the mother a new hope for the next chapter of her life. Maybe she really knows how to do acupuncture, and knows the spot to puncture to remove bad memories. However, we are also left with the possibility that she was a fraud acupuncturist, goes through the motions, and gets up to enjoy the dancing. The desires and obsessions of the film are replaced with shadows running through the aisle of the bus. (This was a typical middle-aged women’s bus trip, only jarred by stylised soundtrack music in the background). A long camera shot, filmed outside of and through the bus, encompasses the sunset.

I just hope that she never comes back to her son from that trip.