Following the record-breaking box office success of The Host (2006), Bong Joon-ho set out to scale down from ensemble-based blockbusters and home in on a single character. Slyly structured with razor-sharp tonal shifts, Mother is a noir with the sexual undertones of Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. When her developmentally disabled son Do-joon (Won Bin) is arrested for the murder of a high school girl, the titular mother (Kim Hye-ja, who is only referred to throughout as "Do-joon's mother" in a pointed display of Korean teknonymy) takes the task of proving his innocence as a divine calling. Bong wrote the role specifically for Kim, a veteran television actress known in South Korea as "the nation's mother" for her beloved matriarch characters. So grand is the mother's sense of justice that the magnitude of the alleged crime as an act of femicide never registers, calling into question the value of blind maternal love in a patriarchal society that incentivizes internalized misogyny as a means of survival. In an unsettling subversion of expectations, Kim punctuates the character's guttural expressions of care with a hostility that betrays an even deeper hatred towards herself and her child as one being.