We were out at the Rio on Thursday night for the newest film by the maker of the brilliant and eye-popping "괴물", "Host", 봉준호 (Joon-Ho Bong).A mother doggedly searches for those responsible for framing her son for the lurid and theatrical murder of a sexually precocious schoolgirl. It's not really a crime thriller though.
The male lead, such as he is, is played beautifully and subtly by Bin Won, and essays a vulnerable, autistic, hesitant, virtually directionless character.
The libido of the plot is entirely driven by the mother's relentless, innocently single-minded pursuit of the invisible, the hidden, the ignored, the conveniently forgotten. This takes her to some bleak scenarios, but the locales are never allowed to overwhelm her sense of purpose.
There are some visual tours-de-force: A golf course at first light, a man picking a driver out of a lake and wading to the bank with it. The mother pours soup into her son's mouth as he pisses against a blue-grey concrete wall by a bus stop.
There's an echo of Laura Palmer in Ah-Jung, as she wonders aloud about the explosive contents of her mobile phone photo folder, and an extremely unflattering portrait of the men of the legal and medical professions in small-town Korea in the reptilian and unctuous lawyer.
The mother's wonderfully judged awkward encounters with the town's schoolgirls, and the unblinking relationship they have with the denied world that Boon can hint at with his bored functionaries, offhand policemen, and self-serving institutional place-men, are compelling and nervelessly drawn.
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