Like any decent soap, “The Mother and the Bear” is powered by human dramas that are contrived, silly and ultimately a little weird. But what actually happens belie what is in execution a relatively sedate story about the spoken frictions and unspoken secrets between mother and daughter, father and son.

Those aforementioned twists: After a young Korean woman (Leere Park) living in Winnipeg falls in an alleyway (caused by what may or may not be a bizarre bear sighting) and is put into a medically induced coma, her mother, Sara (Kim Ho-jung), travels to Canada to be by her side. Hoping to find her distant, comatose daughter a husband, Sara creates an online dating profile and begins sexting — again, for her daughter’s sake — with a man (Jonathan Kim) who saved her from her own little slip in a store. Meanwhile, Sara coincidentally finds an IRL connection with that man’s father (Won-jae Lee), who disapproves of his son’s white girlfriend, who is also Sara’s daughter’s doctor.

Things actually get more absurd, but it feels less ludicrous than it might all read. The film, directed by Johnny Ma, bears a bit of charm, but a lot more bland earnestness. It treads ultimately familiar ground around immigrant dissonances between parent and child and the struggle to express love and acceptance. For Sara, what’s needed to reconnect with her daughter is a one-sided conversation, a lot of homemade kimchi and her own late-life journey of self-discovery.

The Mother and the Bear
Not rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.