anyway yeah i rewatched it. I last watched this in April 2018 and wanted to revisit it post-Parasite.
Parasite & Mother spoilers
It's definitely "quieter" than Parasite and maybe it'll take me more time to appreciate it as much. It's an 8-maybe-9/10 for me.just some surface level similarity thing post-Parasite, in both movies there's a moment where a phone with sensitive information threatens to blow things up as well as a big rock hitting someone in the head. one of the women at the funeral in Mother is also the housekeeper in Parasite.
more Mother stuff
i came across the wikipedia article for the movie and it describes the Mother as a widow. i don't recall anything in the movie about that and don't see anywhere else it refers to her as one so i think that was just an assumption on whoever edited that article. but that got me thinking and i think she maaay have been a prostitute. it's mentioned that when the Mother tried to poison Do-joon (the son) he was five. and he says that she gave him a Bacchus bottle with the poison in it.
Bacchus is a very popular energy drink in small glass bottles but there's also a darker connotation involving elderly prostitutes in South Korea.
anyway in addition to the poison reveal scene, there's a small moment near the beginning of the movie when Do-Joon and Jin-tae (the friend) are in the police station and the Mother comes in with a box of drinks. It doesn't really clearly look like Bacchus but it's in a similar type of small glass bottle. considering what we're shown of Ah-jung's (girl who died) circumstances, i was wondering if those two scenes had a reference to the Bacchus Ladies and maybe if the Mother had a similar past and that's why there's no father in the picture. admittedly this is definitely an instance where i think the "evidence" is pretty shaky. like if the Bacchus Ladies are being referenced and they're like exclusively elderly women, it doesn't quite work because the Mother would have presumably been younger when she had her son. also Bacchus is like go-to-your-Asian-market-and-buy-it kind of common so there's that too. Honestly this sounded stupider as I typed more but whatever. ultimately, i don't think it makes much of a difference but it's interesting to think about.
there's some other stuff i want to comment on but i'll do that later.