Four of Them

-An unnamed woman (Kim Hye-ja), selling grain and illegal acupuncture in a small South Korean town, finds herself a makeshift detective when her mentally handicapped son Do-joon (Won Bin) is accused of murdering a high school girl.

-Kim Hye-ja is so unbelievably amazing. As a meek, doting woman with a fierce, almost unhealthy, love for her son, she has so much going on with her face alone. Superficially, it's somewhere between mild, desperate, and determined, as she gets deeper and deeper into the circumstances surrounding the girl's death, but there's a madness that director Bong Joon-ho zeroes in on, often lingering on her face as she interrogates a suspect or searches through a room, especially when she talks to her son in prison. As said son, Won Bin, who Wikipedia tells me is very famous in South Korea and Japan as a heartthrob, is (I hate this word, okay, but) superb, this very innocent guy with a hair-trigger temper, not nearly as naive as he comes off, yet completely dependent on the tolerance of strangers and the devotion of his mother, well-meaning and hapless and unsure if he's even done the things he's accused of.

-Fine supporting turn by Jin Goo as Jin-tae, Do-joon's ne'er-do-well friend who allies with the Mother to clear his name. There's also the actress who played the murdered girl, shown in flashback and bizarre reenactments, but IMDb is being a bitch about the name of said actress. So there's that.

-Bong Joon-ho keeps you disoriented from the first shot on, always in control even whe nthe plot isn't. His sense of mise-en-scene (shut up, I like that phrase) is impeccable, keeping the tone balancing precariously between humor and suspense, as the plot itself ponders over what is right and wrong, never judgemental. Some scenes are absolutely brilliant, from editing to staging to score (one I particularly like is about a twist, so, y'know).

-I love how it opens and ends with the Mother dancing. In the beginning, it's in a field of grass, her dancing tiredly and almost lazily to lovely music, waving her arms and frequently wiping her face in the mist of it, face switching from bright and delighted to unreadably emotionless, a scene that's put into horrifying context later on. In the end, she's on a bus, I won't say why, but it's so bittersweet and oddly triumphant, her exuberantly dancing among other old folk, getting lost in the tiny crowd and the glaring sunlight as the credits roll.

-I love the way Bong frames the more idiosyncratic characters of the story, the castaways of society. I can't put my finger on it...

-How he does the more suffocating moments of tension, while the Mother is caught in the room of a suspect while he and his girlfriend have sex, for example, are the best moments.

-I didn't get the end. Okay.