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An alluring piece of work, an artful whodunit that melds shrewd plotting with resourceful camera work and sympathetic characters that are fascinatingly, morbidly off.
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100Another must-see marvel of horror, comedy, and impeccable filmmaking by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho.
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100Its combination of dazzling cinematic craft, psychological insight and black humor make this one of the year's moviegoing musts -- and even or especially at her most deranged, Kim Hye-ja's amazing mother is profoundly, passionately human.
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100An absolutely phenomenal film by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho.
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91To follow up his superb "The Host," director Joon-ho Bong has crafted a remarkable film about love, faith, determination, guilt, and honor, a full-blooded, constantly inventive movie that enthralls, entertains, horrifies and never lets go its grip.
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91Again as with Bong's earlier films, Mother is a genre exercise that honors convention, yet weaves around it whenever possible. Bong carefully turns Mother into a classic gumshoe tale, with red herrings, interrogations, and moments of sublime suspense.
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A superb murder mystery, with twists coming thick and fast yet always at the right moments.
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90The hard-pounding heart of Mother, Ms. Kim is a wonderment. Perched on the knife edge between tragedy and comedy, her delivery gives the narrative -- which tends to drift, sometimes beguilingly, sometimes less so -- much of its momentum.
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90A Hitchcock-ian murder mystery that unfolds into a maternal melodrama worthy of Joan Crawford, shot through with bursts of black humor. Bong's ability to sustain three or four different tones in one movie without betraying the emotional truth of the story is nothing short of amazing: He can pat his head, rub his stomach, and break our hearts all at the same time.
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88The film is labyrinthine and deceptive, and not in a way we anticipate. It becomes a pleasure for the mind.
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The easy comparison here is to Hitchcock, but Bong moves at a slower pace, more like Claude Chabrol.
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88You never know where Mother is going to go next. All you know is that you're in the hands of a master with an appreciably bent sense of humor.
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88Bong's film starts out as a comedy, transforms into a quirky Agatha Christie whodunnit and finishes with an unpredictable Hitchcockian flourish.
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83Bong's style is comically tart even in the film's most noirish moments.
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80A chilling, intense character study.
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It may be slow by Hollywood standards, but it's accessible at every moment, and we come away feeling that human character is more complex, and perhaps darker, than any studio is willing to test an audience with.
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Mother is a thriller as well as . . . something else.
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78Moments of great suspense are sometimes invested with intrinsic humor, moments of trauma can yield great compassion. Often, these seemingly conflicting tones exist all at once, while the oblique mystery never clearly identifies the correct emotion.
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75The movie's utter lack of predictability helps to keep you engaged, even if some of the plot turns are a bit baffling, and the unusual depth and complexity of the characters -- the eponymous heroine in particular -- give the picture its unusual, scalding power. You've never met a mother quite like this one.
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75Mother is yet another winner by Bong, one of Asia's most talented directors.
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75Mother delights in confounding viewer expectations. In fact, just when you think it's over, a couple of plot developments remain lurking around the next corner.
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75Mother symbolically doubles as Mother Korea, devoted to her land. But is she blindly and uncritically devoted, too quick to forgive and forget sins that should be redressed, to treat any flaws in the national character as simply intrinsic to the country's nature?
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75A deadpan, darkly funny Korean murder mystery.
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70For all its jarring sound design and herky-jerky pacing, founded on sudden incidents or shocking accidents, Mother is deftly plotted, applying Hitchcockian suspense with a Hitchcockian sense of fair play.
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70Key casting is aces, led by a deglammed Kim, forcefully low-key as the mother who seems capable of anything to protect her son.
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70The fact that Mother keeps its balance is a tribute to the leading actress.
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Bong's stylistic embellishment of the simple tale of a mother who will do anything to protect her son is breathtaking.
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50Bong's opening and climactic scenes, in which the old woman bops around to a dance tune amid a vast field of yellow grass, are typical of the movie's cockeyed poetry.
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40Though diligently paced and sharp to look at, the mysteries inside Mother are, finally, bloodless.
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40Bong is so concerned with whodunit that his creaky genre mechanics diminish Kim's determined performance.
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