South Korean independent film “Mother’s Kingdom” is a somber but unnerving family drama about those tricky questions of belief and doubt. How much are you willing to go along with what is supposed to be a truth? And what are you going to do if that actually turns out to be a lie? As observing its main characters’ quiet but intense personal struggles along the story, the movie slowly reveals whatever has been lying among them beneath the surface, and you will come to reflect more on its main subjects after it is over.

At first, we are introduced to Kyeong-hee (Nam Gi-ae), a middle-aged beautician who has run an old, small beauty salon in her neighborhood for many years. She has lived with her adult son Ji-wook (Han Ki-jang) in their little residence, and the opening scene shows them going through another day of their plain daily life.

However, we begin to notice a number of odd behaviors and symptoms from Kyeong-hee. While she is frequently forgettable, her mind sometimes seems to be gone to somewhere to the bafflement of others including her son. Naturally, he takes her to a hospital for medical examination, and, what do you know, it soon turns out that her mind has been going through the early onset of dementia. While quite confused and devastated, Ji-wook tries his best for taking care of her more as her devoted son after she eventually shuts down her beauty salon. However, Kyeong-hee’s mind irreversibly becomes more deteriorated as days go by, and this certainly frustrates him a lot.

And then she blurts out something very unexpected, which is associated with her husband’s sudden disappearance in her and her son’s past. Maybe what Kyeong-hee says is merely another symptom of her increasingly confused mind, but Ji-wook cannot help but reflect more on that, and then he comes to question what had been told to him during his childhood years. Was his father just vanished for no apparent reason at that time? Or, was his mother actually responsible for that as she says?

While his mother becomes more distant to him due to her worsening dementia, there comes another crucial figure in the story. This person in question is a pastor named Joong-myeong (Yu Seong-ju), and he is the younger brother of Ji-wook’s father. Although having been quite ill due to his terminal kidney disease, Joong-myeong becomes more determined to find what really happened to his older brother, and he certainly bothers both Kyeong-hee and her son a lot when he later approached to them, respectively.

Now this looks like a familiar setup for melodramatic mystery, but the screenplay by director/writer Lee Sang-hak, who makes a feature film debut here after making several short films, takes its time for building up its three characters more along the story. As Kyeong-hee’s mind often goes astray into her repressed memories from the past, we come to gather how unhappy and frustrating she was during that time, which looks like a strong motive for murdering her husband. We also get some little amusement from how Joong-myeong uses ventriloquism as the main part of his church sermon, because he often looks like ventilating his hidden feelings and thoughts through his hand puppet and its squeaky voice. In case of Ji-wook, who has incidentally been earning his meager living via selling his self-help book, he slowly gets imploded inside his mind as becoming more confused about what he has accepted as a truth for years, and this difficult situation of his ironically resonates with his promotional speech on the difference between truth and fact early in the story.

During its last act, the movie becomes a bit more tense as one thing after another is eventually revealed to Ji-wook. There is a disturbing scene unfolded within a certain abandoned space in his and his mother’s residence, and it will probably take you back to one particular short horror story by Edgar Allen Poe. Although the finale is rather ambiguous without wholly clarifying everything in the story, it still chills us to some degree as conveying to us more about how much Ji-wook and his mother have been bound together by those secrets and lies between them.

As a small chamber character drama, the movie surely depends a lot on the talent and presence of its three main cast members, who all are convincing in their respective roles. While ably sticking to a seemingly neutral mode, Han Ki-jang diligently holds the center for his two co-stars’ relatively more prominent acting. Nam Gi-ae depicts well her character’s gradually elusive state, and she is especially wonderful when Kyeong-hee comes to have a morbid but harrowing moment of some inner peace for her around the end of the movie. Yu Seong-ju is also effective in his nuanced acting, and he and Nam did a good job of subtly suggesting a lot of history between their characters during a certain key scene of theirs.

On the whole, “Mother’s Kingdom” may feel a bit too dry and slow at first, but it eventually comes to us as a darkly intriguing tale about belief and faith, though it never spells out its religious aspects at all. In my inconsequential opinion, this is one of more interesting South Korean films of this year, and it will be interesting to see whatever may come next in its promising director during next several years.