Blank verse: "Poetry"

The stately, meditative Korean film Poetry centres on Mija (Yun Jung-hee), a beatific 66-year-old woman, first observed pottering between the doctor's surgery and her day job as a carer. Time will prove her less beatific than originally thought: her attempts to compose a poem for an adult literacy class are hampered by her increasing inability to remember such everyday terms as "bleach" and "wallet". More immediately troubling is that her ingrate teenage grandson - whom she's been left to look after - is part of a group implicated in the suicide of a female classmate, a tragedy in the process of being covered up by both the school and the parents of the other boys involved. In one way or another, words are beginning to fail her.

Seasoned readers of the arts pages will know by now that the phrases "stately" and "meditative" are oft-employed as critical euphemisms for long and slow, which is kind of the case here. Poetry offers up pockets of truth: from the way writer-director Lee Chang-dong observes the teenage boys rampaging through Mija's living room to lock themselves away behind closed doors, he conveys a good deal about the inability of one generation to communicate with another. Another part of this shapeless 140 minutes is in thrall to the construction and performance of poetry itself. Mija's scribblings, and the poetry readings she attends, conspire to bring the film to a halt at regular intervals: Lee is particularly enamoured of a Bernard Manning lookalike who uses an open-mic spot to tell roguish anecdotes about the time his penis popped out at the scene of his motorbike accident.

Something about the premise rhymes with Lee compatriot Bong Joon-ho's Mother, which similarly put centre-stage a woman of a certain age (played by a revered actress) watching over a charge accused of the death of a young girl. Bong went full-throttle for the pleasures of genre, but the psychology underpinning his characters' movements actually felt truer than that of Lee's characters. Poetry botches the hush-up plot - asking us to believe that paying off the parents of rape victims is accepted business, engendering no dissent other than from the one woman who hears of it - to such an extent that any narrative tension leaks out of the film like ink from a pen.

Mija's plight fits the mould of grim arthouse suffering (she will eventually submit to the sexual advances of the palsied man she cares for, in one of those excruciating Bad Sex scenes to which films of a particular inclination are prone) and cues an admirably, in places touchingly masochistic display from veteran actress Yun, who came out of retirement to describe a woman striving to develop an eye for beauty before her tools of self-expression are lost forever. Still, it gets choked up on its own florid couplets, and whole, unrewarding sections of it just don't scan at all.

Poetry opens in selected cinemas from Friday.