Thirty-something Ji-wook (Han Ki-jang), author of a faith-based motivational book (The Power of the Truth), still lives with his mother Kyung-hee (Nam Kee-ae), who is drifting into dementia. As her brother-in-law Joong-myung (You Seong-joo), a pastor, tries to discover what happened decades ago to his brother before the facts are forgotten, Ji-wook too starts asking questions about his past and remembering things from his childhood perhaps better left buried. 

Writer/director Lee Sang-hak’s darkly Freudian tale is concerned with belief, memory, oblivion, and the fictions we keep telling ourselves and each other to maintain the illusion of happiness. Here, past and present increasingly overlap in a domestic world askew with dysfunction. In exploring an intense, unhinged mother-son bond, this evokes Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009), although it is focused more on the son’s difficult path to truth.