On the formal argument that Bong Joon-ho's Mother (2009) makes about the relationship between love and truth.

Mother is about a woman with an intellectually disabled son who sets out to prove his innocence after he is accused of murder. The film appears to be a thriller about a mother's loyalty. It is actually a film about what we will do to protect the story we need to believe about the people we love.

Bong constructs the film so that the audience's relationship to the mystery runs parallel to the mother's: we want the son to be innocent, we follow the investigation, we arrive at what appears to be exculpatory evidence. The film's turn in the final act is not a twist in the conventional sense. It's a revelation about what we have been watching.

Kim Hye-ja's performance as the mother is the most technically demanding performance in Bong's filmography. She has to carry the film's sympathy throughout while simultaneously being revealed as something that the audience's sympathy has prevented them from fully seeing.

The opening and closing sequence — the mother dancing alone in a field — changes meaning completely when you've seen the film. The second viewing of Mother is a fundamentally different experience than the first.