The Mother and the Bear

In a snow-swept Winnipeg, school teacher Sumi (Leere Park) is hospitalized after a fall. On hearing the news, her anxious mother, Sara (Kim Ho-jung), flies over from Seoul to be with her comatose daughter — and once Sara sets herself up in the young woman’s apartment, she discovers she doesn't really know Sumi at all.

In a departure from his previous films Old Stone (TIFF ’16) and To Live, to Sing, which were more serious-minded studies of life in contemporary China, Chinese Canadian filmmaker Johnny Ma embraces a new mode here, using suburban Winnipeg as the stage for a stylized, whimsical narrative of crossed wires, secret lives, and conflicting agendas.

Sara despairs about her daughter’s single status, so she immediately starts catfishing the pleasant Min (Jonathan Kim) to be Sumi’s boyfriend — once she wakes up, of course — and also gets unwittingly entangled with Min’s estranged father, Sam (Won-Jae Lee), who runs a Korean restaurant in the city. As Sam and the widowed Sara connect over their mutual melancholies, a chance meeting with Sumi’s co-worker Amaya (Amara Pedroso Saquel) leads Sara to learn more about the life from which her daughter has chosen to exclude her.

A unique mash-up of genres that boasts the talents of TIFF favourites Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, and Pablo Larraín, The Mother and the Bear marks a bold new direction for Ma. And if you were wondering about that eponymous bear… well, you’ll just have to see the film.

NORM WILNER

Content advisory: mature themes, nudity