Mother

There's a quote in the book For Mom with Love that goes, "A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie."

That's the kind of parent the eponymous Mother (Lim Hye-ja) is in this engrossing, Korean Hitchcockian thriller that showcases the dangers of unbridled maternal affection.

Supporting an attractive but mentally impaired son in his twenties, the self-sacrificing, impoverished Mother scrapes together a modest living by performing acupuncture illegally and selling odds and ends to the local community. All is seemingly going swimmingly until one day the lad, Do-joon (Won Bin), is accused of brutally murdering a teenage girl.

Mother knows Do-joon is incapable of such an act. So when the police and her lawyer cold-shoulder the possibility of her son's innocence, she sets out to find the real killer. Suddenly, Mother is thrust deep into the deranged modern-day world of illicit couplings, cellphone sex diaries, alcoholic old women hot for rice wine, violent hoods, schoolgirl nymphos, and suspicious vendors of the discarded remnants of everyday life.

Ms. Kim, who has apparently portrayed a more iconic mom on Korean TV for over 30 years in The Rustic Diary, gives a heartrending, detailed performance here of a woman of no possibilities, who slowly thrusts aside her dignity, safety, and morality in order to protect her young like a mother bear clawing away at those accosting her cubs. In the end, Mother might just have to ask if her sacrifices are worth the costs, especially if she has live out the rest of her life without any comforting illusions.

Director Boon Joon-ho, who entertained us recently with the delectable monster thriller The Host, the most successful Korean film of all time, here shows he’s beholden to no one genre. His motto, though, seems to be, "In a Dehumanized Society, No Matter How Dehumanizing, the Family Above All." - Brandon Judell

Mr. Judell is featured in Rosa von Praunheim's forthcoming documentary New York Memories. In the spring, he'll be teaching "The Image of the Jew in Post-World War II European Cinema" and "Gay and Lesbian Literature" at The City College of New York. He has written on film for The Village Voice, indieWire, Detour, and The Advocate, and is anthologized in Cynthia Fuchs's Spike Lee Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).