Madonna (2015) User Reviews

A grim Korean mystery

[euroGary · 8/10 · 26 October 2015]

Ms Moon is a care assistant in a South Korean hospital for VIPs, where the nurses dress like air hostesses, all women have to wear make-up and patients include 'the Chairman', a major donor to the hospital completely paralyzed by a stroke ten years before. The Chairman is kept alive by repeated heart transplants at the insistence of his bullying, pantomime-villain son.

One day a young woman is brought into the hospital, brain-dead. She's not as slim and attractive as the woman featured on the film's advertising poster: she's dumpy, garishly-dressed and heavily pregnant. Notwithstanding the obvious danger to the child, she is identified as a potential donor of the Chairman's next heart and Moon is assigned the task of locating her next-of-kin. As she does so, Moon uncovers the sad, small life of a woman nicknamed 'Madonna'.

Moon makes for a frosty heroine, showing little emotion for much of the film, but Seo Young-hee manages to get across the character's determination to do right by Madonna. As the abused, slightly dim, binge-eating Madonna, Kwon So-hyun does particularly well in avoiding outright melodramatics while creating a character the viewer can feel sorry for. There are some plot holes in the film: for instance, just how does Moon gain unfettered access to the Chairman immediately before the transplant? But female director/screenwriter Shin Su-won has created an engrossing mystery story that certainly isn't your average chick-flick; well worth a watch.

A very good quality, downbeat drama

[ebossert · 8/10 · 19 June 2017]

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A nurse's aide named Hae-rim is in charge of an important patient who is completely paralyzed and awaits a heart transplant. The man's son attempts to extend the man's life expectancy for the purpose of receiving his fortune. And considering the status of the patient, most of the hospital staff follow along very willingly. Then, after an accident, a pregnant young woman named Mi-na is carried into the hospital in a vegetative state, and the cold-blooded son (of the old man) sees this as an opportunity for his father, so he offers the nurse's aide a deal. The deal is for her to get an organ donation consent form from the Mi-na's family. Since our protagonist, Hae-rim, is in a poor financial state, she accepts the deal for money. So she sets out to find Mi-na's family with the clue that her nickname was "Madonna," but along the way she discovers the girl's unfortunate past.

The interesting thing about the storytelling structure here is that we basically have two main protagonists: the nurse's aide and the pregnant girl. Fairly early on, however, the flashback sequences become longer and even though these scenes are technically told by Mi-na's acquaintenances (as part of Hae-rim's investigation), it feels like the story is being told from Mi-na's perspective. So we get to spend a lot of time with her, which would not have been the case had the filmmakers simply held the mystery element and told the story solely from Hae-rim's perspective.

You see what happens to her in the present first, and then they shift to an old flashback to her highschool years. After that, they gradually bridge the gap in chronological order and show you how she got from Point A to Point B. This is portrayed in a convincingly realistic manner and I can definitely see this kind of thing happening in real life – and I'm certain that it has happened many times over. Her character is a bit awkward and she has difficulty connecting with other people, which often leads to her getting bullied and taken advantage of, and that's the basis for much of the film. So yes, our titular character is properly developed.

With regard to Hae-rim, she's caught between a rock and a hard place due to the politics at the hospital. There are definitely some shady shenanigans going on there, and she's pressured to acquire that organ donation consent regardless of whether or not the means are immoral. So she grapples with that throughout the film. There are also a handful of social commentary subtexts in this as well, which I will let you discover for yourself.

In terms of negatives, there really were not many that jumped out at me while watching "Madonna." This is 2 full hours long and moves slowly, so I can see some viewers having a bit of a problem with its pacing. But it does unfold efficiently and takes its time to tell a well developed story. The drama and conflict also ramp up during the second half for sure.