If you haven’t heard of this movie… Well, I can’t blame you. It’s a Korean film (so you know it’s going to be fucked-up) about a murder allegedly committed by a kid with Autism or some such disorder. The only one who believes in his innocence is his mother, who sets out to find the real killer and clear her son’s name.

As soon as I heard that synopsis, I knew that I had to see this movie. It’s like a classic underdog story told as a whodunnit, but with the inspired step of casting a middle-aged woman in the role of hard-nosed detective. How could a movie screw up a premise with so many creative possibilities?

Badly. Really fucking badly.

Let’s take it from the top. We start with the son, who’s very sweet but clearly not right in the head. He’s easy to sympathize with and never goes “full retard,” so kudos to the actor responsible for that. Unfortunately, his difficulty with social procedures and horrid short-term memory allow him to be easily manipulated to the point where he’s led to believe in his own possible guilt.

Then we have his mother. She works hard as an unlicensed acupuncturist, but she’s poor and her son is all she has. Unfortunately, no one is willing to help her, either because of her poverty or because her son is alleged to be a murdering lunatic. And this is where my problems with the movie started.

The police are only interested in the son because they’re inexperienced at solving murders and they need a scapegoat. The lawyer his mom tries to hire is lecherous and greedy. In every scene, the son and his mother are surrounded by no one but perverts, drunkards, bullies, brawlers, robbers, money-grubbers and idiots of every stripe.

To summarize:

• The son and his mother = Honest, downtrodden and hard-working.
• Everyone else = Total douchebag.

So after the mother endures some more abuse, she goes out on a limb and tries to find evidence for her son’s innocence. This leads to a scene that is actually very tense, but it’s all for naught. The clue turns out to be a red herring. And then the would-be suspect shakes down the mother for a hefty sum of money, just for the inconvenience. Most good movies strive to find ways to keep their protagonists active in the plot. This movie slaps its protagonist across the face for having the nerve to try and then kicks her while she’s down, just for fun. Seriously, what the fuck?

And so the movie continues in this vein. She investigates the murder, meeting one dipshit after another as she keeps losing more and more. But everything will get better when the final reveal is made and we see how it all really happened… right?

The big reveal basically establishes that the son and his mother — the only two characters in the entire movie who aren’t assholes — turn out to be total assholes. What’s more, everything the mother did in the entire running time was completely meaningless. I was ready to walk out of the theater right then. But if I had, I would have missed the second big reveal, in which we learn that everything in the first reveal was wrong. It would’ve been nice, except that the second reveal comes out of the blue through absolutely no involvement on the mother’s part. AND THEN we get a scene which says that the second reveal might be wrong and the first reveal was correct. So which one was right? Who cares?! If the only two options I have to choose from are a betrayal by our protagonists or a totally unearned deus ex machina, I’d prefer to take neither and walk out the door while flipping the bird over my shoulder!

But no, I kept watching. I kept watching until the finale, when the mother finally gets her reward for all this. Is it a gift from her son? A kiss from a love interest? Nope: She uses some mystical pressure point on her thigh that allows her to forget all of her recent grievances, effectively erasing the movie from her memory.

To which the only sane reply would be: AAAAAAAAAUUUGH!

On one level, it completely erases her character arc, making everything she’s done in the movie entirely pointless. On another level, it’s like the movie is openly admitting that it is so painful, the only way to enjoy it is to forget you ever saw it. The ending is a declaration that the audience has wasted two hours in front of a screen, with no apology but a stiff middle finger.

I have never been so offended by a movie in my entire life, nor have I ever been so glad that a movie is so obscure. Yes, the acting is good from our two leads, the visuals are often creative and there’s some great tension in a few scenes. But this doesn’t make up for the godawful editing, the nation’s worth of annoying and irredeemable characters or the painful, unpleasant plot that overtly insults its audience. The filmmakers may as well have written “FUCK YOU” in big, black letters across every frame.