From the maker of the South Korean monster movie, The Host, Joon-ho Bong. This time he does without a monster, as well as without such staples of the regional cinema as ghosts, gore, and martial arts. He delivers instead a straightforward detective story about a Mommie Fearless who launches her own investigation to clear her retarded son of a murder charge, pursuing a solid chain of clues to a satisfying if unsettling and unconventional conclusion. It remains all the same a tribute to Mother Love, however warped. Though the director still shows a weakness (a little less of a one) for the dopey comedy that weakened The Host, this is a small matter alongside the endlessly exciting wide-screen visuals, the meticulous compositions, the inventive variety of approaches, the full compass of angles, the especially good use of long shots of all distances — all the things, in short, that would enable us to speak, in highfalutin terms, of a broad cinematic vocabulary and a flexible syntax. With Hye-ja Kim, Bin Won, Goo Jin, Young-Suck Lee. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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