Mother dances in a meadow.

Her son, Do-joon, is run over before her eyes by a Mercedes.

The failure to rescue, the encounter with the owners, wealthy golfers who consider the breaking of the mirror of their Mercedes 280 more serious than a human life, places the 2009 Asian Film Festival winning film on the same wavelength as the film Parasite, by the same director, winner of Cannes 2019.

Wealth and poverty, social, cultural, judicial discrimination.

A symbiotic/pathological mother-son relationship, troubled by a life lived in poverty, in a house with only one bed, where people cook for the manhood of their son, who is nevertheless considered "retarded" by everyone.

A murder case will further overwhelm this relationship.

A girl is found murdered and hung up lying on a terrace for all to see.

Indeed, everyone flocks to see the crime scene as on CSI, as on TV, as in circus celebrations of violence.

Do-joon often gets into trouble, is troubled, gets drunk, has no job, and seems the perfect scapegoat to close the murder case; who better to have committed that crime?

Only his mother never gives up and tries to hire lawyers, to identify alternative avenues of investigation; she accuses her son of signing the confession when one should never confess and invites him to massage his temples; she has always taught him to remember with this ritual.

But the son's recollection becomes an indictment of his mother, the past and childhood.

However, the stubbornness of the mother, who cannot accept her son's condemnation, will not give up in the face of any evidence.

A disturbed, responsible, absolute and resolute mother who will stop at nothing, even the most violent acts in order to exonerate her son and thus herself.

Breathtaking scenes in which psychological, physical, social violence reaches unspeakable levels of ruthlessness; the superficiality of the investigation, the corruption, the obstinacy of those who are ready to kill even in the face of any evidence of guilt; the most total abjection of the human soul at any level, in any condition, without discrimination.

Despite the mother's obstinacy, the evidence of guilt will spontaneously converge on another boy, at the sight of whom this mother will weep because he is more wretched than her son Do-joon, an orphan moreover.

The hierarchy of human misfortunes does not make Bong Joon-ho's human any less inhuman.

And that very "retarded" son has no pity for that mother who urges him to memory, heedless it may be as painful and pressing as that of a child who has never grown up. And that very mother has no pity for that son she knows to be the birth of a suicidal motherhood buried in oblivion.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice