On DVD: Insane, Brilliant Mother Signals Yet Another Korean Landmark

New waves come and go. The Iranian zeitgeist seems to be gradually fading from eminence, the Romanians are lazily spinning their wheels, and the Malaysian wave still lingers on its rumored promises. But we still have the Koreans, more than a decade into their explosion -- and we shouldn't take them, including Bong Joon-ho and his latest release Mother, for granted.

New Korean cinema has been a nothing less than fireworks, scrambling boiling-oil hyperbole, recycled-plastic popness, neo-art film minimalism, abattoir farce and an overall yen for subtle excess, if you know what I mean. A Korean film's emotional peaks aren't paced or grounded in a way we're used to; comedy, romantic agony and mad loyalty can all arise abruptly, like magma spurts. If you've tasted Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003) or Lee Chang-dong's Oasis (2002), you can probably still feel that tang on the back of your tongue.

But it might be Bong who has come to define the movement. Certainly Bong's The Host (2006) is the most-seen Korean film internationally (it's still the biggest South Korean moneymaker ever), and it is, for a giant monster movie, a pungent helping of what makes Bong so spectacularly entertaining: the scent of narrative risk; the nutso tenor of the social satire (which as always with Bong can spike and nova in the middle of a serious scene so suddenly you're left rubbing your eyes in shock); the beautiful unpredictability of the screenplay; the weird and possibly unquantifiable attainment of genuine pathos amid a torrent of goofiness, grue and farcical hyperbole.

Mother is another genre piece turned inside out. Ostensibly a murder mystery, it places all of its bets on a lower-class, middle-aged mom (Kim Hye-ja), whose semi-retarded 20-something son Do-joon (Won Bin) gets himself arrested for the bludgeon murder of a local girl. In South Korea, Kim is an iconic and maternal TV superstar, an cultural object of trusted veneration. But Do-joon's mom (the character has no other name) is another kind of animal altogether: a peasant herbalist who still cuts her son's food up for him, who is as determined and fearless as a superhero, and who is also, it becomes clear, absolutely insane.

The story tracks Kim's diminutive mother as she relentlessly tries to disprove her son's guilt and find the real murderer, resorting to flat-out crime, suicidal risk and then much worse. But as usual with Bong, the modern South Korea she wends her way through is an unbalanced character all its own. The police are Keystone-esque fools and sadists (a recurring Bong motif). The social rituals (meals, funerals, even investigated crime scenes) are hair-raising debacles, and the society itself is sick with secrets. (As is the mother-son relationship central to the tale, rich with unspoken taboo-bustings.) Memory, as in Bong's earlier masterpiece Memories of Murder (2003), is the slippery fish at the narrative's center. Bong doesn't control our reactions to his film; there are gruesome hunks of any Bong film that may seem fizzily funny to many viewers, and vice versa, and you never know how you'll react.

A festival fave last year (festivals rejoice when a supposed "arthouse" film is also a juicy pulp experience), Mother is a character study -- albeit one that withholds from you like a shade-drawn neighbor -- and it's Kim's show. In no time at all (just about the time she unwittingly causes a car wreck in mid-street), Do-joon's mother becomes an unforgettable cinematic creation, a mysterious and even fearsome agent of rectitude so vividly crafted you remember her as you might a very real and crazy aunt. (The anti-casting helps; note that the oafish Won Bin is ordinarily a hunky Korean action star.)

Still, Bong's visual choices -- always thoughtful, disarming, meditative -- are never less than bewitching, from the underhanded shot of the dead girl's open eye to the opening and closing balletic portraits of Kim, bizarrely dancing in a flowering field. Even if this isn't your choice for best Korean film of 2009 -- Park's Thirst might take it -- it remains essential, right-now, state-of-the-art moviemaking.