Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mother’ on Netflix, a Gripping Japanese Drama About a Toxic Mother-Son Relationship

I’ll help you sort this un-Google-able movie-title hell. The new 2020 Netflix film Mother is Japanese director Tatsushi Ohmori’s story about a young boy’s loyalty to his delinquent, abusive mother. Darren Aronofsky’s wildly, wonderfully disorienting mother! (2017), identifiable by that exclamation point, puts poor Jennifer Lawrence at the center of a hurricane of her husband’s — and the world’s? — madness. And Bong Joon Ho’s grossly overlooked Mother (2009) is a flipped-script version of Ohmori’s film; it’s about a mother’s loyalty being tested when her son is accused of murder. Are they all worth watching? For sure. Are they all extraordinary? REVIEW SPOILER ALERT: Yes!

MOTHER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Shuhei (Sho Gunji) plods sadly up the street, his knee scraped and bloody. Akiko (Masami Nagasawa), his mother, rides up to him on a bike. He’s likely been bullied; he’s not in school. That’s OK, because she skipped work anyway. She ebulliently licks his knee (yes, ick) and takes him to the public pool, where they jump in, ignoring the lifeguard’s insistence that they not do that. Akiko seems to be merely cheering up her son; she, too, was bullied for being different. It soon becomes clear she has no regard for rules of society or personal behavior. Many years will pass before Shuhei goes back to school. Yes, years.

But I’m getting ahead of things. Akiko and Shuhei visit her parents and sister. She owes all of them money, which doesn’t stop her from asking for more. “She’ll just gamble it away,” her mother grouses. Akiko screams and yells compulsively, instinctively, lashing out whenever she faces even the slightest adversity. She meets Ryo (Sadao Abe), and they’re birds of an impulsive, childish feather. She tries to pawn Shuhei off on Ujita — to whom she apparently gives sexual favors — before running off with Ryo. Shuhei, who’s maybe seven years old, spends six days on his own in their tiny apartment with no hot water, eating dry, uncooked noodles. When Akiko returns, she shows little concern for her son. But she and Ryo do try to use the boy as a prop to extort money from Ujita by accusing him of child molestation.

Then, Akiko gets pregnant. She drops the news on Ryo, who responds by beating her and Shuhei. He runs off. Akiko has Shuhei ask her mother and his biological father for money. His father asks Shuhei to come live with him. He refuses. Subtitle: 5 YEARS LATER. Fuyuka (Halo Asada) now tails Akiko and the teenage Shuhei (Daiken Okudaira). They’re homeless. Shuhei and his little sister wander the streets while Akiko sits at a slot machine. A social worker, Aya (Kaho Tsuchimura), finds them under a highway, sleeping, gets them a state-sanctioned place to stay. Ryo returns. Aya tells Shuhei he doesn’t have to stay with his mother. He refuses. It’s a vicious cycle.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I think I covered this in the intro. It also resembles Netflix original All Together Now, at least in a superficial manner, since it’s also about a homeless teenager with a problem mom.

Performance Worth Watching: Nagasawa is extraordinary as the mother who’s stuck in neutral, most likely due to some unidentified and untreated psychological stunting or mental illness. She’s the subject of the film’s powerfully ambiguous final shot.

Memorable Dialogue: Aya: “You can choose to live away from your mother if you want.”

Shuhei: (silence)

Sex and Skin: A brief PG-13-grade non-nude sex scene.

Our Take: Mother is an engrossing, authentic and troubling portrait of mental illness, a extraordinarily written, directed and acted tragedy. Where so many films dogmatically hold up the concept of family togetherness as a moral endpoint, this one has the courage to call out such absolutism. The family in this movie needs to be broken. Shuhei has been sheltered from outside influence for so long, he considers his mother’s decisions to be valid merely because they’re hers, not because they’re in the family’s best interest. He wants to spend time with other children. He wants to attend school. He wants to read books. She doesn’t let him. And he quietly complies, his nature blockaded by nurture.

The film’s central mother-son relationship is a complex entanglement of enabling and codependence. She’s caught in cycles as abuser and the abused, and routinely, inexplicably rejects kindness, whether violently lashing out or quietly abandoning the situation forever. The story is told wholly from Shuhei’s point of view, but without his inability to discern cruelty from love. We’ll grow to hate this woman, and pity her, and our ability to empathize will be tested. Ohmori holds long, pregnant pauses in the dialogue whenever Shuhei ponders a choice in front of him. You’ll want to fill the silence with a frustrated scream.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Mother is a fascinating drama, gripping us until its brutal and ironic conclusion.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Mother on Netflix