mother -madeo

Kim Hye-ja, a veteran Korean actress, plays an unnamed widow living alone with her only son, selling medicinal herbs in a small town in southern South Korea while doing unlicensed acupuncture to the town's women on the side. Her son, Do-joon, is a shy, quiet and somewhat mentally disabled young man, whose Mother tirelessly dotes on and scolds for hanging out with Jin-tae, a local ne'er-do-well.

A high school girl is discovered dead on a rooftop in town, shocking the residents and pressuring the incompetent police to find the killer. With only circumstantial evidence placing Do-joon near the scene of the crime, the police are happy with their cursory investigation and arrest the boy. His defense attorney is unreliable, and the police trick Do-joon into signing a confession, leaving him facing a long jail sentence. The police could not figure out why and who would display the girl's dead body on the rooftop where the entire town is in plain view.

The mother, horrified and unconvinced that Do-joon is even capable of murder, gets involved in unraveling the details of the murder and the background of the victim to try and prove her son's innocence. She scours the town, uncovering salacious details of the girl's life, allying with Jin-tae, who was surprisingly sympathetic towards her plight, and unsettling everyone around her in her determined quest for justice. The mother's investigation and search for the real murderer takes her to an old man at his junkyard.

At the drop of a hint by an old man, the town's junkyard keeper, that Do-joon may have actually committed the girl's murder, the mother, in a fit of rage and denial, murders the old man and burns down the junkyard along with his body. Later on, the police, unbeknownst to the mother, captures who they believes to be the real perpetrator of the murder of the girl and Do-joon is freed from the jail. By then, the mother could not deal with all her confused state of emotions, particular when Do-joon tells the mother the reason why the killer may have left the girl's body on the rooftop is perhaps to allow the town's people could see her and bring some medical assistance.

The movie ends with a similar setting as the beginning where the mother is emotionlessly dancing away her weariness of the world around her.(wikipedia)

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