The Mother and the Bear

At the center of The Mother and the Bear is a mystery implied by the title: did 26-year-old Sumi (Leere Park) slip and fall after encountering a bear in a dark alley, or did she merely get spooked on a cold, icy night? News reports allude to the possibility of an ursine sighting, but most seem skeptical of the idea. The answer to that question proves less important once the inciting incident reveals itself as a means of introducing Sumi’s mother Sara (Kim Ho-jung) to both the story and the city, but an air of intrigue hangs over the rest of Johnny Ma’s lovely character study nevertheless.

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Beginning with audio of voicemails left from mother to daughter, the film quickly turns into a fish-out-of-water story and Sara flies from Korea to visit Sumi in the hospital. She’s expected to make a full recovery, but not until she wakes up from a medically induced coma — a precaution that gives Sara all the time she needs to meddle in her daughter’s personal affairs. She wants nothing more than for Sumi to find a nice man to settle down with, ideally a fellow Korean, but knows less about her daughter’s inner world than she thinks she does.

Because she can only spend so much time sitting by a hospital bed, Sara quickly sets about an equally urgent matter: making Sumi a profile on a dating app without her knowledge or consent. The Mother and the Bear is, at its heart, the story of a well-intentioned catfish, as Sara contrives to make the most of her impromptu visit and find a suitable son-in-law. Mothers don’t always know what’s best for their children, but least our heroine wants what’s best for her daughter.

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It’s rare to see a performance worth discussing in a movie released in the first week of January, but Sara is so charming and likable in every small movement and gesture that you’re on her side from the moment you meet her. Kim, a familiar face on South Korean screens, is a relative newcomer on this side of the Pacific; one hopes this is an introduction rather than a one-off. Though much of what Sara does is questionable (if not worse), we never question her motives. Sumi might take issue with what her mother does on her behalf if she were conscious, but the film’s unique framing ensures that we always see things with Sara’s perspective in mind.

Though much of what Sara does is questionable (if not worse), we never question her motives.

When she isn’t busy catfishing a potential suitor for her daughter, she’s loudly singing along to “Unchained Melody,” using the bathtub to make vast quantities of kimchi, and getting pursued by the father of the man she’s trying to set up Sumi with. “A mother’s kimchi cures all,” he tells her when she shows up with a grocery cart full of ingredients. Sara’s recipe is a point of pride, a homemade expression of love and affection for children and love interests alike. She is, in a word, adorable, but having just traveled halfway across the world, she isn’t exactly worldly. Sara finds out the hard way what “DTF” stands for after receiving a lewd photo from one of Sumi’s matches, eats a handful of THC gummies without realizing what they are, and lands on “I have no diseases in the family” as a good opening line — three of the funnier moments in a movie replete with them.

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She isn’t the only stranger in a strange land. “I know Sumi as well as anyone else here,” one of Sumi’s colleagues tells Sara, “and sometimes I feel like I don’t really know her.” There are a little over 200,000 Koreans living in Canada, a small but significant diaspora whose only major cultural depiction prior to now was the lovely sitcom Kim’s Convenience. Ma zeros in on this underrepresented community at the micro level while keeping the focus on Sara and Sumi at the macro level, with nearly every aspect of the film coming back to a question Sara asks her comatose daughter during a particularly difficult moment: “Are you still the same little girl that was in my womb?”