OVERVIEW
The Mother and the Bear is a Canadian-Chilean, low-key comedy-drama that follows a Korean mother in Winnipeg. After 26-year-old Sumi has a serious accident and falls into a coma, her mother, Sara, flies from Seoul to be by her side. Panicking about her daughter’s future, Sara meddles through a dating app, trying to line up a “suitable” husband before Sumi wakes up, and the plan pulls her into an unexpected journey of her own.
BACKGROUND
The film is Chinese-Canadian Johnny Ma’s first Canadian feature, and it fits a thread of immigrant stories that has become increasingly visible in the country’s cinema. Instead of focusing on the immigrant herself, Ma centers the film on her mother, trying to bring empathy to a figure often treated as an obstacle or punchline in this sort of setup. The premise grew out of a Seoul hostel encounter with an older woman whose daughter lived in the West, and her persistent questions about dating abroad gave Ma the core of the story.
THE REVIEW
It’s refreshing to see the mother become the focus of this kind of story, brought to life by Kim Ho-jung. The film gives Sara an arc of acceptance toward her daughter’s choices, and she loosens up along the way. On the surface, it shows in the clothes and hair, but Ho-jung sells it more through voice, movement, and the way she carries herself, far less rigid by the end than in her slightly hunched posture at the start. She also lands much of the comedy through timing, especially when she sells Sara’s indignation at the lack of food in her daughter’s fridge. The film sometimes pushes Sara into caricature, like when it has her drag another character across the floor. Yet most of the time, when she is not placed in its most exaggerated situations, Ho-jung grounds her in believable emotions.
Yet, despite how much Ho-jung adds to the film and Ma’s good intentions, there is a pervasive sense that the story comes from a younger person trying to understand an older generation, making a few assumptions and never fully grasping the mother’s agency. The script frames Sara as a wide-eyed outsider, constantly shocked by Canadian culture and curious about why her daughter chose to live there in the first place. Still, through her shenanigans, we do not get a clear sense of who this woman is outside of her daughter or this particular experience in Canada. What awaits her in Korea, and why does she so desperately want her daughter to return? Does she have a support system there, even a friend? And, most importantly, what frustrations from her own life shape the expectations she places on her daughter? Those are interesting questions the film leaves mostly unexplored, and a collaborator with an older perspective, perhaps as a co-writer, might have helped bring them to the fore.
There are also moments of awkward execution. Some of the Korean karaoke stylization feels apt at first, but it also cheapens the film. When she first sees a promising candidate, Sara sees heart shapes, and later keeps singing “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” over and over again. Those scenes lean too silly, and they even had me wondering if, at some point, she was arranging the young man for herself (maybe that was part of the point, but it does not feel like the film is playing it that way). There is also a pivotal moment at a bar, when she discovers a truth about her daughter, that is staged so strangely that I could not tell what it was meant to represent for Sara.
Her relationship with Won-Jae Lee’s Sam offers some cute moments but is marred by melodramatic dialogue and beats (“nobody has cooked me kimchi since my ex-wife passed away,” he says, in a way that almost feels like he is faking it). To close it out, the film leans into the second half of its title in a completely unnecessary sequence, made worse by unconvincing CGI. And although it is easy to see how having scenes with the daughter and mother sharing the screen could have heightened the melodrama, and I do like that Sara’s journey is allowed to unfold on its own, the timing of Sara’s departure is very hard to believe.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Overall, The Mother and the Bear is a film born of good intentions, and younger audiences, especially those close to Sumi’s age, might identify with it. Viewers nearer to Kim Ho-jung’s age may have a tougher time, even though the film appears tailored for them. Nonetheless, Ho-jung offers sharp comic timing and genuine nuance, keeping the film watchable. Still, Sara’s life beyond her daughter could have been better explored, leaving her more one-dimensional on the page than the film seems to intend.