I’m not approaching Bong Joon-ho‘s Snowpiercer with an attitude. Seething class warfare on Runaway Train sounds like a great concept. But Joon-Ho’s Mother struck me as a little too Brian DePalma-esque, and I’m a bit afraid of that flourishy, operatic style. “There’s no doubting that Bong Joon Ho is a DePalma devotee in the same way that DePalma was a Hitchcock acolyte in the ’70s and ’80s,” I wrote five years ago. “Mother was by far the most interesting sit because of his immaculate and exacting composition of each and every element — deliberately unnatural, conspicuously acted, very much a director’s film.” Joon-ho himself has proudly declared that DePalma is a major inspiration. In my book that means “caveat emptor.”
