Mães (2020)

A story about how not to do grief.

Don't be fooled by the cheery three-generation family scene in the poster. This two-part drama is almost unrelentingly bleak. The first episode is about a family in grief. They are frozen, shut-down, withdrawn, and sundered from each other. As is so often the case in Korean dramas, they are in desperate need of communication but can't. We are not shown anything of their lives together before the death, and so we can't feel any connection with them and we can only observe, and there are no lighter moments to provide some relief.
In the second episode they start to talk, but a culture of blame means that all they can express is rage and crushing guilt. The husband is trying to care, but he is accused of not grieving because he is not evidently suffering enough. Eventually the truth behind the death emerges accidentally, not because anyone is genuinely trying to find understanding. The real culprits are not within the family, but are a narcissistic and abusive husband/father, and the contemptuous male-dominated corporate culture. This drama is apparently a story for women, and finally most of the women of the story start to care for and support each other, but it's only hurriedly depicted near the end of the second and final episode.
Far too much grief, not enough background story to engage us with this family and care about their suffering, and not nearly enough about their repair and healing. The stars I gave this were basically because I didn't drop this one half-way, but that was mainly in hope that there would be a point to all this suffering. In the end, it wasn't worth the ride.
The acting was convincing, but it didn't require any subtlety or skill. They had to depict either shut-down or enraged.
The background music was minimal and I only noticed it near the end, when it seemed to be working to lift us out of the bleak mood, because the story was not strong enough to achieve that unaided.
The english subtitles which are available are evidently not by a native English speaker, and there were several moments when it wasn't clear what was actually going on i.e. the translator didn't know how to express things clearly in English. I think this had a significant impact on my viewing experience.

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