The world only got to know Bong Joon-ho better with the Oscar-winning “Parasite”, but even then this Korean was working wonders. One of the best examples is “Majka”, a fantastic mix in which Bong has once again perfectly interwoven the genres of thriller, crime, social drama, horror and even black comedy, and which is only marginally reminiscent of one of his most famous films, “Memory of Murder”. There, too, we had a case of murders in a small town where underpowered police inspectors had never encountered a similar crime. And there, one of the suspects was a mentally retarded, under-capacitated young man who found it relatively easy to cover up the murders, close the case and pretend that everything was ok.
However, in “Madeo” Bong introduces the character of an eccentric mother, extremely protective of her poor son, who will start investigating the murder of a promiscuous girl herself in order to prove that her son is innocent. We will understand until the end why the partly desperate mother (fantastic Hye-ja Kim) who is a local healer, herbalist and acupuncturist does what she does, and Bong wouldn’t be Bong if he didn’t have many surprises there. And complete shocks, twists that I guess only he can come up with, and this is a film that, with good reason, has won more than 40 awards at world festivals and in the elections for the film of the year, along with another fifty nominations.
At first, everything here may seem obvious. Yoon Do-joon is an under-capacitated young man who will nevertheless viciously attack anyone who teases him about his mental retardation. His mother taught him not to let anyone down, and his mother is very angry that Yoon’s only friend is the thug and local petty criminal Jin-tae. But the question is how much Jin-tae is his friend, and how much is he taking advantage of, because when problems arise, he puts all the blame on Yoon, as is the case right at the beginning when they demolish the car of the guy who almost ran him over with a car. Yoon also likes to drink, so one evening after a party at a local pub, he will follow a poor but promiscuous girl to an abandoned building, whom he will find dead the next morning.
Immediately, Yoon will end up in pre-trial detention with numerous witnesses linking him to the crime scene and material evidence suggesting that he is the killer. But the mother is convinced that he couldn’t have done it, but that tiny woman in her sixties will start snooping around and very quickly find out that a lot of things don’t match the official theory. She will turn into one of those sleuth sniffers, a private detective who seems more capable than the disinterested types employed by the police, but we will understand by the end that she is still primarily a mother. A completely desperate woman who sees what she sees, perhaps precisely because she cannot follow reason at all, but only her heart, which tells her that her son could not possibly do such a thing.
“Mother” was a great film, and for the reason that Bong here again so cunningly and thoughtfully plays with almost standard clichés from police films, murder thrillers. In a masterful way, he almost manipulates the viewer’s emotions, puts together a mosaic, only to soon tear it completely apart and force us to start looking for solutions and answers from the beginning together with our mother, even though the answer is actually right in front of our noses. And he does all this with so much style, with spirit, so that this nominally painful and difficult story is constantly broken up with humor, and “Madeo” still stands out as one of the highlights of new Korean cinema.