What does a child owe a parent who keeps failing him? Mother, Tatsushi Omori's 2020 Japanese drama, follows a boy named Shuhei through years of neglect at the hands of Akiko, the mother he cannot bring himself to abandon.
What is Mother about?
Shuhei's days have no shape to them. School is optional, because Akiko, his alcoholic mother, has other uses for him: she sends him to beg money from his grandparents, who disapprove of her and have little patience left, and she drifts from one unreliable man to the next while her son waits. When a baby half-sister arrives, Shuhei takes on her care as well, becoming the only steady adult presence in a household that has none. The film tracks mother and son across a long stretch of time, watching the boy grow while his circumstances refuse to improve, and asking at every step whether the loyalty he feels is love, habit or something he has never been given the chance to question.
About the cast
Masami Nagasawa heads the cast, with Daiken Okudaira, Kaho, Sarutoki Minagawa, Taiga Nakano, Kaho Tsuchimura, Zenki Aramaki and Shima Onishi making up the ensemble. The performances are restrained and naturalistic, in keeping with the film's refusal to soften its subject, and the central mother-son relationship is carried through long, unhurried scenes rather than dramatic confrontations.
Context & significance
Tatsushi Omori's film belongs to a strand of contemporary Japanese cinema that examines family breakdown and poverty with a documentary-like patience, letting ordinary rooms and ordinary silences do the work that other films leave to plot. At a little over two hours it takes its time, and viewers should expect a slow, heavy drama rather than a conventional story of rescue. Its interest lies in the mechanics of dependency: how a parent can be both the source of a child's suffering and the only person he has, and how that bind tightens as the years pass. The Japanese setting is specific, but the dynamic it describes will be recognisable to audiences anywhere.
Watching Mother on Ktime
K-Time offers Mother with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can watch it in Farsi or in the original Japanese with Farsi text. A K-Time account login is needed to stream the film, and the service's Farsi interface is designed for Persian-speaking viewers living outside Iran. The subject matter, including addiction and child neglect, makes it a film for adult and older-teen audiences.