The protagonist Kang-do is a heartless, violent man. His boss loans people the money they ask for, but he demands impossible interests so nobody can pay him back, so he sends Kang-do. Since those people were required/forced to sign an insurance policy for handicap, when they can't pay their debts, Kang-do mutilates them; he uses the same tools of their work to injure them, so they can get the insurance money, but since they have to give the money to him, they have nothing left. More than once they have killed themselves.
Kang-do has no-one in the world and doesn't understand feelings like love or compassion.
One day a woman appears, saying that she is his long-lost mother, who was so young when she had him that she could not keep him(I'd say, she looks more like a 'big sister' than a mother). He doesn't believe her, but she won't go away, she follows him around, cooks for him, she persists on her intentions of getting back with her son. Again, violence and hard scenes: Kang-do rapes her, but still she won't leave him.
I don't know why they made a scene where she helps him masturbating, in what kind of strange-sick world is that a mother's job? Did that scene have any reason to be, other than to make 'scandal'?
Anyway, so much violence I did not like, he was really cruel.
Slowly, though, he gets used to having her around and he starts spending time with her; when she's attacked by one of his victims, he realizes she's in danger and quits his job. He grows fond of her, he never knew love before and never had it, not even as a baby.
Still, their relationship is not at all normal, and in the second part of the film it all becomes slowly clear and interesting. No more violence, but feelings: sadness and love, vengeance and repentance. The more attached he becomes, the more distant she suddenly appears. Her behavious is very confusing : she sends him away when he wanted to sleep next to her, but she hugs him when he was so worried not finding her at home; she hurts him when she takes away from him the sweater she had been knitting (he had thought it was a gift for him, but she took it away without a word) but then she sings 'happy birthday' to him... and he now seems to cherish these moments.
One day he's out and she calls him on the phone. We can see her alone at home screaming and making noises around the house to fake an attack, so he runs to her in a state of panic. When he doesn't find her at home, he thinks she's been kidnapped and fears for her life, and starts looking all over for her. We have already seen she has a secret place and can already understand she lost someone (we saw a man committing suicide at the beginning of the film). This dead man is her real son. I liked this actress a lot. It was a powerful scene when she staged her final act.
After Kang-do has looked for her everywhere and he's now powerless and worried sick, she goes to his boss. She knocks and then she slaps him in the face. She theatrically takes her phone high and calls Kang-do, after slapping the boss again. When Kang-do answers, he hears the voice of his boss insulting and hitting his mother, and her screams before she hangs up. The boss goes back to his office, and now she goes back in with a huge chain and lock and now we hear his screams. We don't see what happens, but she is unharmed, so he's either dead (probably, she killed him as part of her vengeance, for what he did to her son) or unconscious after the beating (unlikely I'd say, but we have no real proof one way or the other).
Kang-do receives the picture of a place (easy to guess that she sent it to him to make him go where she wants him). When he runs to her, she is at a high floor of his place without walls (I don't know what place it is, did they mention it before or it didn't matter? Boh)
She pretends to be with her assailant, pretends to be scared and begging, and she screams for help, and then she looks at him while he throws himself on the floor prostrating , begging for this person (who doesn't exist because she's alone) to let his mother go, to kill him instead, please, to kill him but to let her live. This man who for the first time has someone in his life and would rather die than lose her sort of touches her. There's a moment when she cries, looking at him begging, feeling a sort of pity for him. Her plan was to make him feel, only to make him lose all that he now cherished and needed so much. For a moment I was quite taken aback by her words of pity, as if they were not right, after all her plans and all he had done, to her, to her son, and to many other people, but then I saw it differently. Unlike him, she's always been a normal person with feelings, and now her heart finds a little (little) space in which she feels pity for this man who is now so different, and who is begging to be killed so that she can be saved. I guess for normal people it's quite natural, specially since it's only a tiny bit of her that feels that way, she has NOT forgiven him because that's not possible after what he's done, all the evil he did and all the pain he caused her (honestly I'm not sure she cares much about the pain he caused others, after all she could have ended much sooner, when she was attacked, and the man, a victim of Kang-do who could no more work now and could only beg for money, was forcing Kang-do to kill himself or he would have killed her: she could have let him, she would have died anyway in her plan, it would have been over sooner, but that was not enough for her, she wanted Kang-do to suffer a loss like she had, so she freed herself letting Kang-do kill the man).
So she goes through with her plan, she throws herself off that building a moment before a woman was about to throw her down (a mother in a similar condition, another victim of his cruelty).
Kang-do suffers terribly and cries, then he buries her exactly where she had told him she wanted to be buried. When he digs, he finds the body of her dead son, wearing the sweater she had knitted for him (she put it on him when she buried him I guess. Quite a resourceful woman, I wouldn't have had the strength to carry a man's body and bury it in such a short time).
He must realize the truth now. She wanted him to know because now he has lot much more. He thought he had lost his mother but now he realizes he never had one, he never had her love, he has nothing to cling on to. He's dead inside, and wants to die; he commits suicide in a very peculiar way: he chains himself under a woman's vehicle (the poor wife of a man he injured, who now has a very poor, very very hard life supporting both of them). When she leaves early in the morning, she knows nothing of his presence and she 'kills him' by driving, and we see her vehicle leaving a blood-red trail after itself.
A symbolic ending, as if trying to make amends for the pain he caused dying in that horrible way, as if he wanted to give her compensation granting her her wish of vengeance, but since I am what I am, I couldn't help thinking of how harder her life will become when people will discover the dead body, and who could ever believe her innocence? She really knows nothing about if, but she did hate the man and wished him dead, wished she could kill him herself if only she could get away with it, and now he is dead and who could ever believe she didn't know he was chained under her car??
But the film ends before the body is found, so I guess I'm not supposed to think of 'what happens next' but simply stop and look at the symbolic death of this cruel man who was yes a bit moving in his moments of torment, but who still deserves it all because his cruelty was not justifiable, in no way, because nothing one has been through in their past can justify the evil actions one does as an adult. It can explain, but not justify it. Nobody has only one way to go: one who has been wronged can choose to wrong others or to fight to avoid others being wronged or to try and forget it and live their own life as they can. He chose the evil path, he did have choices.
So, the second part had interesting moments, but being who I am I can not accept the final. I might have, had they included something that would have proved that poor woman's innocence. Not like this.
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