A subject as old as the hills; a mother wanting to avenge for her beloved son who was killed in a rumble by a hoodlum ; the screenplay is trite and melodramatic in its second half but the actors do save the day :Karine Viard is arguably one of the best contemporary Gallic thespians , who is not about to fall into the "feel-good' stuff which mars today's French scene ; to a lesser extent ,his young co-star rises up to the occasion .Both make an endearing part who,little by little, realize they have more in common than they thought ."A mother" is good title ,because halfway through ,it gets two meanings :"he had everything ,he went to highschool , he had a motorcycle .......and he had a mother !"

In spite of one or two occasional gaffes (the poisoned cup of coffee offered to the visitor which the thriller buff must have seen a hundred times or more ; the rat poison in the cupboard,left for all to see) , it's an effective psychological drama with a denouement at once predictable and unexpected; I second the reviewer who wrote that for a first effort it's certainly good.

This is a movie where it earns its stars towards the end.... This is where it becomes different to the usual vengeance type of stories.

Maybe some viewers gave up too early ?

A mother wants revenge against the man who savagely killed her son. That's pretty expected.

However, It's not an action movie, it's about the evolution of the characters, both of them needing closure.

Hence, what makes this movie touching is that both the killer and the mother actually needed closure.

Karine Viard is great in playing the character of the mother who just can't move forward in her life so she thinks that revenge would help her.

However she learns that it's not that simple.