7/10
After reading multiple glowing write-ups I wanted to like this more than I did. You know that feeling when you're watching a movie and you can acknowledge it does everything right but just can't find a way to get into it? That's what I felt. The story is about an elderly woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's joining a poetry class while faced with the dilemma of covering up her grandson and his friends' repeated **** of a 16 year old girl, driving her (the girl) to suicide. The story has plenty to interest and the material is approached in a very restrained, non-sensational manner. The direction and cinematography is beautiful (not a stretch to call it poetic, really) and Jeong-hie Yun (retired for decades, if I'm not mistaken) is tremendous in the role of the grandmother. The film is very nuanced, posing lots of questions and refusing to give easy answers. While I did enjoy it, I just couldn't let myself be as taken with it as I would have liked.
Superficially there are a lot of parallels between Poetry and Mother, both Korean movies about an elderly woman forced into impossible circumstances by the crime of a teenage (grand)son. Where Mother relies more on genre conventions and a bit more "flash", Poetry may be the more technically accomplished film. I still preferred Mother though.
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