A boy's best friend

마더 [Madeo] (Mother) 2009 South Korea (128 minutes) directed and co-written by Bong Joon-ho

A schoolgirl is discovered murdered and left ‘on display’ over a railing on the roof of a vacant building of a provincial town in southern South Korea.

The girl’s skull is broken; yet despite a farrago of salacious rumors, she is fully clothed and sexually untouched. Circumstantial witnesses put a 27-year-old man with the mentality and judgment of a small child at the crime scene. Police find a golf ball near the girl’s body on which earlier we saw the man inscribe his name. The suspect signs a confession.

Moon Ah-jeong (Moon Hee-ra) ‘Rice Cake Girl’ hanging over a roof railing
in Bong Joon-ho’s Madeo 2009.

The viewer saw this man follow the girl to the crime scene on the night in question. He had had a lot to drink, and he aimlessly was throwing golf balls he had in his pockets. A brief exchange ensued; the girl appeared to run him off. And then the man shambled away as though he forgot what he was doing there, returning home to his mother.

The signed confession makes this an open-and-shut murder case for the police. Nor does the suspect’s identity surprise the victim’s family or town’s residents.

But Mother (Kim Hye-ja), the boy’s mother—she is not referred to by name (another character once calls her ‘Mrs. Kim’)—knows that her sweet, simple-minded son Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) could not possibly have murdered anyone. She decides to get to the bottom of what happened on her own.

Mother raised Do-joon alone in the intimate private space they still inhabit; the life of the town has eddied around their domestic narrative. Mother is a traditional ‘wise woman’: she sells medicinal herbs in a shop and practices unlicensed acupuncture.

Do-joon is a traditional village idiot: a good-natured imbecile who never worked a day in his life and is the butt of the townspeople’s rough humor. He tags along like a puppy after Jin-tae (Jin Goo), a ne’er-do-well his age whose antics often get Do-joon in trouble—and cost Mother money.

The acting that makes the mother and son roles work is remarkable. Kim Hye-ja’s Mother talks to Do-joon throughout the film like the five-year-old he always has been. One occasionally catches a gleam in her eye that reveals how intensely she works to sustain their domestic narrative. Won Bin’s Do-Joon conveys through doe-like eyes a look of mild curiosity convincingly several beats off the usual pace.

Detectives Nam Je-moon (Yoon Je-moon) and ‘Sepak Takraw’ (Song Sae-beauk) with Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) at the police station in Bong Joon-ho’s Madeo 2009.

The murder mystery evokes a David Lynch drama: an eccentric protagonist enters the looking glass of a provincial city’s normal life seeking answers and discovers unsettling distortions of the town’s placid conventionality—and in this instance, her own story.

The distortions stem in large part from the low status of women and girls. Beneath a thin veneer of propriety, women are treated as though a lower order of being; teenage girls are sex objects.

Nam Je-moon (Yoon Je-moon), lead police detective on the case, knows the family and feels for them, but he is busy. He tries to humor Mother, but the case was over for him when Do-joon confessed to the crime and signed a statement. There is no call for Je-moon further to investigate or to try to find Ah-jeong’s cell phone, for instance. 

Mother turns to Kong Seok-ho (Yeo Moo-yeong), ‘the most expensive lawyer in the county,’ to take her son’s case. It does not take her long to see that the only thing the campily supercilious Lawyer Kong—a great piece of character acting—takes seriously about the case is Mother’s hard-earned money. Her final ‘meeting’ with Lawyer Kong exceeds the bounds of poor taste in any culture, not to mention legal ethics. 

After an embarrassing initial misadventure as her own private eye, Mother is inspired by the passion of her number one suspect to find out what really happened to the murdered schoolgirl Moon Ah-jeong (Moon Hee-ra).

Ah-jeong lived with and took care of her alcoholic grandmother (Kim Gin-goo). Stories went around that ‘Rice Cake Girl’ had sex with anyone who gave her food. Mother also finds out from talking to schoolchildren that Ah-jeong enlisted another schoolgirl’s electronic wizardry to make a ‘pervert phone’ to try to turn the tables on male sex bullies.

However, the old saw that ‘things are rarely what they seem’ is true at least as often as the notion that people miss or willfully ignore details in plain sight which belie their comfortable or conditioned assumptions.

The story sustains its quick pace and intensity throughout with odd characters, tense moments, and hairpin plot turns. Telling details ring true when they come back in a variety of ways, often inadvertent, through different characters as the story progresses.

And evidence depends on who is doing the reading. Unlike letting the proverbial falling chips tell their own tale through a Sherlock Holmesian process of deduction, people tend to start with a fact or two and fill in missing parts with their own ideas, motivations and prejudices to tie up the loose ends. Therein lies the tale.

As in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces, Madeo’s ending wraps up the story but leaves a viewer with the uneasy sense that the larger evil is still very much abroad. The last casualty may be Mother’s cherished personal narrative.

By the end, Mother would agree with Ecclesiastes’ Preacher that the knowledge and understanding which bring wisdom, especially of oneself, are not bought cheap, For in much wisdom is much grief: and she that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

According to director Bong Joon-ho, the title Madeo (마더) is a Korean trope on the English words ‘mother’ and ‘murder.’ These words make the same sound to a Korean speaker: Korean phonetics renders both English words as ‘madeo’ in transliteration. The two most common Korean words for ‘mother’ are omoni (어머니) or, more familiarly, umma (엄마); ‘murder’ in Korean is sarin (살인).