Surprise?

I might have to walk away from Korean films for a while and come back to this one. Maybe it's this director and his desire to have American audiences, not only like his films, but to connect with them. While I loved the Host, I did because it took more than just watching to get it. The metaphors and symbolism was deeper than surface level, whereas with Mother, aside from one scene at the very end, it's all pretty straightforward. I knew nothing about this film other than it had won some awards, but after watching it, I came away very unimpressed. If you watch enough foreign films, especially Korean horror and thrillers, you'll notice there are lots of characters thrown in, for no other reason than to distract from a fairly simple premise. With Mother, it's even more blatant. The entire first 30 minutes is inconsequential, but for a split second that is brought up later the Mercedes mirror. There is one huge plot hole that can't go unmentioned the junk man being on the dead girl's phone, because it's the source for the twist. I am actually surprised that most people were surprised by anything in the movie. In many ways, this played out like a handful of American movies, but with different relationships depicted. Like I said, maybe a few years from now I'll revisit this and be in a foreign film rut and it will be striking, but for me, this was a complete dud.