Mother
Psycho Marple. Just like all criminal Bong Joon-Ho films, the whodunnit appears to be a very complex web of motives and suspects, but turns into a nearly throwaway situation, completely random and unpredictable.
Finding out the truth leads to worse outcomes, letting sleeping dogs lie is usually smarter.
There’s a gigantic amount of red herrings, it’s ridiculous. Nothing is what it seems.
The plot revolves around a young manchild, somewhat retarded (but don’t tell him that!), who lives in a slum-ish suburb with his mother, a witch doctor with a small practice. They have food and all, but poor prospects of improving their situation.
The man(child) hangs around with a local street-smart dude, and after some rich snobs nearly run them down, they track them to a golf course, “tweak” their Mercedes Benz, and start a small scuffle to get a nice looking golf club. The destruction of property is the only action taken seriously, and the manchild takes the fall for the street-smart dude.
This puts him in a bad mood, so he goes to the local dive bar to get drunk, while the street-smart dude is nowhere to be seen, the local hookers even get restless. After a couple hours of drooling into tables, the boss’s daughter shows up, and he’s kicked out for being a bad influence.
On the way back home, he passes by a girl coming school, and nearly gets hit by a big rock. He shrugs it off, and gets into bed with his mum. The next morning that girl shows up dead, splayed right on roof of that house. Gotta be some kind of voyeur nutter, to put her on a public location.
The police do their investigation, and quickly arrest our manchild, over the wailing of his mother. She hires a lawyer, but he doesn’t care at all.
She doesn’t take this lying down, and goes full Marple, taking matters into her own hands. After visiting his son, she pieces together some clues and goes to town.
First she searches for the street-smart dude, who seems to have disappeared after the Mercedes situation. Turns out he is holed up is his slum-ish shack, far from other people, except the daughter of the bar’s boss. So that’s where he went the other day! Our mother even finds a red-stained golf club he “took” from a lake, and manages to exfil herself and the club from the shack, amidst the couple’s throes of passionless sex. The police are willing to extend the investigation, but the dude notes the stains are lipstick, and he has the embarrassing videos to prove it.
The dude accepts the snitching in exchange for some cash, but encourages the mother to keep on investigating. At this point, I totally misread the clues and got convinced the street-smart dude was getting away with murder scott-free. I’m just a Watson.
Focusing now on the girl, Our mother asks around, and she had some unflattering nicknames around fucking and rice, and a particular boyfriend took away to a psychiatric hospital. Her best school friend speaks of a mythical cellphone with incriminating evidence, and there are also two boys looking for it, using force. Our mother activates the street-smart dude batsignal, and he comes thundering into a Jack Bauer interrogation. Turns out the cellphone exists, the murdered girl did engage in hanky-panky for rice, but she was looking for a way out.
After more prodding, the cellphone does appear, in the care of her perpetually drunk grandmother. Rooting all over the fucking blackmail material, our mother and her son identify an eye witness to the crime, a breakthrough! Off she goes.
The eyewitness turns out to be a local scrap seller, a character that hangs around on the background of many scenes, dragging his cart around. As he deals with people, even though he looks like a bum, he’s actually a nice old man who just wants to talk. After telling a white lie and approaching the murder subject, he reports what he saw that night, and that he hasn’t gone to the police yet.
That report leaves our mother in horror, as he describes the girl being frightened and furious at men in general, her son being called “retard” and snapping, throwing the big rock back to the girl, killing her instantly. After he flails for a while, thinking of what to do, he displays her in full view, to see if anyone else can help her. After that he just goes quietly to bed, completely oblivious to what happened.
The mother is catatonic. When the scrap dealer decides to call the cops with this important information, she is the one that snaps and kills him. When murder is too evident, she burns down his house and escapes to the woods.
Ironically, by this time our manchild is released, because the boyfriend in the psychiatric hospital is found with her blood on his clothes. He explains this was due to consensual sexual practices, but he has even more serious mental problems and nobody believes him. He takes the fall, and our manchild is released into the care of his mother.
After leaving prison and hanging around the burned down scrap shack, our manchild retrieves the mother’s acupuncture kit, and returns it. Mixed with previous remembrance of a attempted murder-suicide when he was very young, this is too much for our mother, who goes down quietly into the night, dancing…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.