J Paul Johnson
The Mother and the Bear, Johnny Ma’s third feature film and his first world cinema entry since 2019’s To Live to Sing, operates from a gloriously simple fish-out-of-water conceit: an overbearing Korean mother travels to Winnipeg to care for her comatose daughter. From there, Ma pulls out no shortage of stops, as the mother’s meddlesome ways, complicated by her ineptitude navigating wintry Winnipeg, lead to all kinds of comic foibles—and, by the film’s third act, all kinds of feels as well.
The twentysomething-and-apparently-single daughter in The Mother and the Bear, Sumi, is comatose in the wake of a nasty fall on Winnipeg’s slushy streets, where she just might have been frightened by the sight of a lost bear wandering its alleyways. Mother Sara (Kim Ho-jung), a widow, swoops in from Seoul with good intentions but soon is caught up in worry that single Sumi will have no one to care for her in the future. Her solution? I’m guessing she’s not familiar with the term, but soon Sara is catfishing for a suitable and quite preferably Korean husband. Maybe, just maybe, she can land one on a dating app before she wakes up. Or, maybe, the Korean cutie she just met and starts to stalk will do, never mind that he already has a pretty white doctor on his arm. What are the chances that the best prospect is the same guy online and in real life?
Or, for that matter, what are the chances that that prospect also just happens to be the estranged son of the lonely Korean restaurateur Sara’s just met? Nearly a million people live in Winnipeg, but the few Sara meets are all connected. No matter, though: The Mother and the Bear‘s plot is primarily a simple platform on which its series of gags and foibles can commence, most of them anchored by Kim’s priceless expressions and perfect timing.
A few for-instances in The Mother and the Bear, Sara espies the handsome Min (Jonathan Kim) in a grocery store and stalks him through the aisles, not realizing her every surveillance move is caught on the store’s own mirrors and cameras. Later, when she learns from a hospital nurse how to navigate a dating app, she pauses to consider her advice to add a sultry pic to the profile, and for a moment contemplates just how to make her comatose daughter look a little sexier for the potential right-swipers. And when Sumi’s friend stops by her apartment to feed the cat, Sara of course mistakes her for an intruder and knocks her out cold.
As Sara continues her schemes to match Sumi with Min (even though Sumi shows no signs of recovering), she finds a new friend in the restaurateur, Sam (Won-Jae Lee), who makes a delicious kimchi. He’s separated from his wife, who returned to Korea, and he and Sara bond over their love of kimchi. Suddenly, love is all around: Min’s relationship with the doctor may not be perfect, but it’s based on something real. And, it turns out, even the relationship between Sumi and her “friend” Amaya (Amara Pedroso Saquel) might well be something more than merely platonic.
Once Sara’s scheming and meddling start to slow, so too does the plot’s manic energy, and the third act focuses more on the relationships. That, though, is what makes The Mother and the Bear so sweet: that even while its comic foibles are constant for its first two acts, they’re all leading somewhere, and that somewhere is someplace worth going. Amaya helps Sara learn that Sumi (despite her being in a coma) is perfectly content with her life as it is and together with Min and Sam they all show Sara that love is possible anywhere, anytime.
Shanghai-born and Toronto-raised, writer-director Ma perfectly captures the slushy, frosty muddle of Winnipeg in the winter in The Mother and the Bear, a place where locals find warmth in ankle-length down, wooly caps, steaming bowls of kimchi, and, eventually, each other. As the bear of a mother whose meddling makes up most of the film’s sweet comedy, Kim delivers a great performance. She’s sweet, fierce, and funny AF in holding the whole of the film together. Its sweet, spry tone is accentuated by some smart graphics (Tomás Roca) and the clever original music (Hélène L. Delorme) and sound design (Roberto Espinoza) full of every whoop, beep, and whirl you might imagine and others you wouldn’t.
Together, it all makes for a splendidly funny and touching viewing experience. To be fair, The Mother and the Bear‘s third act does not quite connect as well as its first two, when each character is fresh, their actions unpredictable, and the depths to which Sara will sink are as yet unplumbed. It’s then that Ma’s script and Kim’s performance are at their funniest and finest. But of course, those foibles are all for the better when they lead to the feels, and at its conclusion The Mother and the Bear proves it holds a fiercely beating heart.
