Film Review: Mother (2020) Japanese with English subtitles. Directed by Tatsushi Omori - Netflix

I’m a sucker for arty movies about relationships, so when I saw that this 2020 film exploring the abnormal relationship between a mother and her son had received a 100% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I had to give it a try.

Masami Nagasawa plays the volatile young single mother Akiko, and Sho Junji captivates as her small, delicate-looking young son Shuhei . The movie starts with Akiko visiting her parents and sister and harassing them for money. We quickly learn that Akiko repeatedly takes money from her family as ‘loans’ but never pays them back. Despite playing the single mother card, Akiko doesn’t spend the money on food, bathing, and clothes for her son, nor does she encourage him to attend school with any regularity. She tells him he is bullied, but the only reason for this is his poor hygiene and sporadic attendance.

Instead, Akiko crams coins into slot machines and drinks too much. Her relationships with men are casual and often manipulative, seeking a room or drinks from them. We never find out why she is like this but it seems likely that she has psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies. She is mercurial in temperament, laughing hysterically one minute, slapping her son the next.

Akiko meets a waster, Ryo (Sadao Abe) at the fair and they become lovers. Unforgivably, she goes away with him for some time, making inadequate plans for her son, who ends up staying on his own in a flat with no electricity, crunching dry, raw pot noodles. So inured is he to this neglect that he doesn’t panic or cry, he simply survives the best he can. Akiko and Ryo are both too selfish and unpredictable to stay together, and when Ryo hears unwelcome news, he storms off.