It begins in a somewhat unsettling manner, with a woman in late middle-age walking through a beautiful field surrounded by trees. She seems to be obsessed, and yet she gives way to a fit of dancing, celebrating something of which we will remain unaware until the last thirty minutes of the film, and which will then send chills down our spine.
The setting seems to be a small town in South Korea, and the season seems to be fall, when rain abounds and there is a perpetual gloom in the air. It reminds me very much of the setting to the film "A History of Violence", which takes place in a small town in Indiana. The lighting contributes to this sense of weight and oppression. We have melancholy and expectancy.
The plot revolves around a supremely protective mom and her son who seems to be developmentally disabled. At first impression the teenager would seem to be a normal laggard, obsessed with lounging around and being popular, but we quickly become aware that he is mentally challenged. He is an eternal child, incapable of taking care of himself, and his mother would seem to be consumed with some form of guilt.
In the course of these events a young schoolgirl is murdered, and suspicion falls on the boy. He is summarily arrested and convicted, and his mother begins a crusade to prove his innocence. The depths to which she will descend in her mission proved to be alternately heartwarming as well as chilling, and it is this change of tone that provides much of the impact to this film.
Suffice it to say, she will pursue her mission to exculpate her son with what can only be described as mother's zeal, and she will find out many dark secrets about this town. Unfortunately, she is not exempt, and the audience will find out her own dark secret, that of attempting to poison her son when he was a five year old.
After several false pursuits she will find the real killer, who will turn out to be her son after all, acting out in rage against the girl who had called him a "retard", thus eliciting a killing instinct. This instinct will become evident in the mother as well, who will kill the only eyewitness to the crime, seeking to preserve a shred of doubt. It is a terrible moment in which we see the tranmutation of a mother's love into a homicidal instinct. It reminds me as well of the Buddhist injunction against attachment, and how it can lead to all manner of suffering.
In the end, this was an engaging thriller that left me pensive in a way that other thrillers haven't. There are no cheap thrills here. Everything seems to proceed with an inexorable logic, and if anything,the quest of this mother reminds me of an ancient Greek drama, that of Oedipus the King. Like that character, this mother insists on pursuing her quest to discover the killer of the young lady, and at several moments she is warned about the possible impact, but she refuses to desist. When she makes her discovery, it is almost unbearable, leaving her profoundly shocked and the audience similarly perturbed. The secret is hard to contain, and it warps our perspective.
While we many continue to empathize with this mother and her obsession/guilt, it is hard to identify with her any longer. She is punished by a sense of crushing guild and her puzzlement over her instinctive actions, and it seems she has lost part of her illusions about herself. As with the chopping scene in the beginning where she cuts a finger, she is no longer whole. And we are left to wonder at the illusions that we weave about ourselves, and how vulnerable we all are.
Copyrights ORomero 2011
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