Mother

When Bong Joon-ho released Mother in 2009, it marked a striking departure from the global spectacle of The Host. Instead of monsters rising from the Han River, the director turned his lens inward, crafting an intimate yet unsettling portrait of maternal devotion pushed to its limits. The result was a haunting crime drama that blurred the lines between love, morality, and madness.

The idea began with a single thought: what if Korea’s most beloved “TV mother,” actress Kim Hye-ja, played a mother who could kill? For decades, Kim had been adored as the nation’s warm, selfless matriarch on television dramas. Bong, ever the master of subversion, envisioned her in a role that dismantled that idealized image. He wrote the script with her in mind, later admitting that without Kim’s involvement, the project might never have been made.

Behind the narrative of a son accused of murder and a mother’s desperate fight to prove his innocence lay something even more personal. Bong has often acknowledged that the film was partly inspired by his own mother, and by a fascination with the overwhelming, sometimes dangerous intensity of maternal love. Mother explores how devotion can be both nurturing and destructive, driving someone into moral darkness in the name of protection.

Like his earlier Memories of Murder and later Parasite, Bong also used the story as social critique. The film exposes how institutions treat the marginalized - the poor, the powerless, and the mentally challenged - and how prejudice and class divisions seep into justice.

Yet what makes Mother unforgettable is its refusal to offer clear answers. Bong designed the story to unsettle, not to resolve. The quiet despair of its protagonist, the ambiguous ending, and the lingering sense of guilt all leave viewers wrestling with uncomfortable questions: How far would one go for family? Can love blind us to truth?

For Bong, the film was more than a thriller; it was a deeply personal project he described as a film he “absolutely had to make before turning forty.” Intimate in scale but vast in implication, Mother stands as one of his most haunting works - a portrait of love so fierce it becomes terrifying.