To be released tomorrow on DVD

When he’s really cooking, the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho seems to reinvent movie storytelling itself. The word “Hitchcockian’’ keeps coming up in discussions of his latest sublime outrage, Mother, not because there are elements of violence, obsession, and wrong-man suspense in the movie — oh, there are, there are — but because Bong has us so completely in his grip. You never know where Mother’ is going to go next. All you know is that you’re in the hands of a master with an appreciably bent sense of humor.

Remember, this is the director who in The Host (2006) used the timeworn Godzilla genre as a vehicle for slaphappy social satire. Bong’s latest is, on the face of it, a melodrama with classic bones and a novel conceit: a loving mother (Kim Hye-ja) turns detective to free her imprisoned son (Bin Won) from a murder rap. Yet a playful, deadpan surrealism transforms each scene into a nail-biter in miniature, and Bong delights in showing how South Korea’s rigid social structure can’t help devolving into murder, madness, and all-around bad behavior.

It’s clear from the beginning that this mother, a neighborhood herbalist and unlicensed acupuncturist, takes maternal devotion too far and that the object of her affection, a 20-something son named Do-joon, is a barely functioning idiot. As is typical for Bong, that opening scene involves an extremely sharp paper cutter and a speeding Mercedes, your guess as to which will draw first blood.

With the help of his putative best friend, a strutting neighborhood bad boy named Jin-tae (Goo Jin), the son wreaks revenge on the owner of the Mercedes in a very funny donnybrook at a golf course. What’s shaping up as a comedy of errors, though, takes a dark turn when a local schoolgirl is found dead on a balcony in view of the entire town. The police immediately arrest Do-joon, who was seen drunk and grabby at a bar the night before.

The path by which the mother turns snoop is similarly roundabout. Poor thing, she’s not the sharpest needle in the acupuncture kit, but she’s unshakable when she gets a notion in her head. Convinced (for a while, anyway) that the friend did it, she sneaks into his house and is forced to hide in the closet when he returns home with a girlfriend. Old idea, but Bong gives it stylistic bounce and dread and something harder to pin down — a sense that the mother is sailing into an unknown world where she may as well make her own rules.

The plot keeps cranking forward, turning up daft surprises as it goes. Mother eventually involves recovered memory, cellphone hacking, police detectives who karate-chop apples from suspects’ mouths, and the proper insecticides to use in a suicide. All this is delivered in high cinematic style. Hong Kyung-Pyo’s camera swoops and dives, sometimes pulling back until the mother is a tiny figure in a vast landscape, at other times rushing in to register the many shades of consternation on an old lady’s face. Mother is smooth work — on a formal level, the Hitchcock comparisons aren’t far off — but Bong is going for a deeper disorientation.

He’s aided immeasurably by his leading lady. Kim, 68, is a longtime fixture of Korean TV dramas (in which she often plays mothers), and her unnamed character here has the dazed, determined look of the put-upon soap opera heroine she doubtless is in her own mind. The mother’s impassioned love for her son is a hint she hears music no one else does, and in a few eerie scenes, when things are going particularly wrong, she breaks into a demented private rumba. Kim neither ennobles this woman nor makes fun of her — an elegant balancing act.

Bong, meanwhile, does his level best to keep us off balance. He favors gorgeously constructed scenes that bristle with random elements. Why does the dead girl’s friend send the mother off to buy Kotex when she wants to get rid of her? Is it another reminder of the blood that has spilled and will continue to spill? Is it a coincidence that, for the most part, only women bleed in this movie?

If there’s a flaw in Mother it’s that you sense, far below the genre games and dada slapstick, an exhaustion, an anger, with Korean society that Bong will probably need to address more directly someday. For now, he’s an inspired craftsman with an appealingly fiendish sensibility — the more apt comparison may be to Polanski rather than Hitchcock — but he could be much more. He has a mother of a movie in him, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get to see it. Grade: A

Other new movies to be released tomorrow on DVD:

A Town Called Panic (2009) Plastic toys Cowboy (voiced by Stéphane Aubier), Indian (Bruce Ellison) and Horse (Vincent Patar) buy 50 million bricks, setting into motion a crazy chain of events at their rambling rural home. Belgian animators Stéphane Aubier’s and Vincent Patar’s A Town Called Panic has the most in common with the old Nickelodeon series Action League Now!!, in that it’s a little too rough-and-tumble for young kids, but it isn’t exactly subversive or smart-ass, either. It’s more like what a preteen with an overactive imagination might come up with if left alone with a farm playset for an afternoon. It’s more clever than funny, but it’s very clever. The film is equal parts cute and frenetic, and may disappoint those expecting something more scabrous. It may also exhaust some viewers once they realize that there isn’t much more to the movie than one nutty incident after another. But those who stick with it may be surprised by how involving those nutty incidents become, and by the amount of thought put into every scale model and every surreal plot twist. Just know this: A Town Called Panic is the kind of movie in which you will see a horse in a Santa Claus suit, riding on a manta ray in order to dupe a race of wall-stealing fish people. Adjust expectations accordingly. Grade: A-minus

Prodigal Sons (2010) In high school, Kimberly Reed was male, a straight-A student and captain of the football team. But since leaving his rural Montana hometown, he's become a woman — and a filmmaker whose documents her return for her 20th high school reunion. At the heart of the film, a family drama in the form of a succinct, eloquent personal journal, is a sibling rivalry whose reverberations touch upon the very essence of human identity: what we inherit, what we learn, how we move forward and to what degree we look back. Reed’s on eggshells with one of her classmates, Marc, her adopted brother. Since he was left back in preschool, Marc has been the struggler to her high achiever, his behavior problems exacerbated by a brain injury. He's on multiple meds and given to hair-trigger explosions that he says aren't the real him — even as Kim looks at pictures of herself as a boy and says with certainty, “That wasn't me.” Marc's research into his biological roots leads to the revelation, 30 minutes into the film, that he's the grandchild of two of the biggest names of 1940s Hollywood. This tantalizing twist may provide answers, but it doesn't prevent Marc's deepening mental illness or quell his conflict with Kim, who comes to understand that “we were both haunted by the same ghost.” Reed insists on pursuing difficult questions, and this is a film not easily forgotten. Grade: B-plus

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009) A documentary that chronicles Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg's daring endeavor to leak top-secret government papers that disclosed shocking truths about the Vietnam War and Nixon's presidency. How rare it is for anyone, working at any level in the public or private sector, to “give priority to conscience over career.” Or over a paycheck. But Daniel Ellsberg did just that, and in the highest echelons, engaging in an act of civil disobedience that, during a conflicted time, earned him conflicting labels. To some, he was an unalloyed hero; to others, including Henry Kissinger, he was “the most dangerous man in America.” Those like me who lived through the Vietnam War era, and paid attention, will find this documentary short on revelation but long on poignant reminders. Those who didn’t, and haven’t studied up, will not only be edified but flat-out impressed. The film argues that the seeds of Watergate are traceable directly to Daniel Ellsberg. No doubt, but it’s partial truth. Actually, the Pentagon Papers, although widely disseminated in the summer of 1971, went largely unread by an American public who, in the fall of 1972, returned Nixon so resoundingly to office. In the later endgame, Ellsberg was a factor, but only one of many. No, the fascination of Richard Nixon is that he was the leading, and by far the best, architect of his own demise. Grade: B

The Runaways (2010) Dakota Fanning stars in this musical biopic as Cherie Currie, lead singer of the 1970s all-girl rock group the Runaways, whose meteoric rise up the charts was saturated with drugs and other excesses of the era. Kristen Stewart, who plays Currie's bandmate Joan Jett, is surprisingly good; the head-down non-responsive attitude that is so annoying in the Twilight films is much more at home here. Jett is lost, after all, until she cranks up her guitar, at which point Stewart comes alive, as well. And Fanning, famous as a child star, is all grown up as Currie — or at least as grown up as Currie was allowed to be. What's lacking are surprises or any sort of different take on the traditional rags-to-rock-riches story. The performances help make up for that — Michael Shannon is an absolute scream (who is often screaming) as the band’s manager. Even better, the songs hold up particularly well. Jett would go on to a massively successful career with more of a pop-rock sound. The Runaways were more raw, more primal. The Runaways broke new ground. And if The Runaways doesn't, it's still a movie worth watching — and listening to. Grade: B

The Losers (2010) After learning that their handler, Max (Jason Patric), has set them up, a group of disavowed CIA operatives led by Clay — aka the Colonel (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) — bands together to bring down their betrayers. The movie is a stupid, over-the-top comic-booky action picture with the occasional cheesy effect, oddball casting and an utterly predictable get-that-guy-before-he-gets-us plot, but Chris Evans and a couple of his mates make it passable entertainment. It is a PG-13 action film — so the blood, profanity and sex are discreet. Director Sylvain White (he did Stomp the Yard with Columbus Short, who’s also in this one) keeps it loose and jokey, referencing the comic books and skipping by the silly plot. He also has to battle Morgan’s lack of charisma (Idris Elba chews him up in their scenes together). Morgan’s expected easy journey from Grey’s Anatomy to the movies has been filled with flops, unreleased films and Watchmen. He seems downhearted. But Evans fills in some of that void with a cat-got-the-canary performance. Grade: B-minus

Cop Out (2010) Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis) and off-kilter Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) are two suspended cops trying to track down a stolen and very valuable 1950s baseball card. Take these two cops who love each other and drive each other crazy. Construct a rickety story involving a Mexican drug cartel (in New York?), the disappearance of Jimmy’s invaluable 1952 Andy Pafko trading card, a stolen Mercedes, a kidnapped hooker (Ana de la Reguera), and two smug rival officers (Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody). Make Paul unbearably obnoxious, and then make him look better by adding an even more obnoxious thief (Seann William Scott). Have director Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy, Dogma) throw it on the screen. The result is a quintessential buddy-cop film ... and I don’t mean that in a good way. Smith is a very funny guy, but plot has never been his specialty, and this is nearly all plot. There are a few hilarious bits, but even those are drowned out by constant gunfire and Morgan’s motormouthing. Willis is going through the motions; Scott is funny, if irritating; Morgan is irritating and not so funny. Grade: D