The Films of Bong Joon-ho: Memories of Murder (2003)

Memories of Murder (2003) 

Directed by: Joon-ho Bong.

Written by: Joon-ho Bong and Sung-bp Shim based on the play by Kwang-rim Kim.

Starring: Kang-ho Song (Detective Park Doo-man), Sang-kyung Kim (Detective Seo Tae-yoon), Roe-ha Kim (Detective Cho Yong-koo), Jae-ho Song (Sergeant Shin Dong-chul), Hee-Bong Byun (Sergeant Koo Hee-bong), Seo-hie Ko (Officer Kwon Kwi-ok), No-shik Park (Baek Kwang-ho), Hae-il Park (Park Hyeon-gyu), Mi-seon Jeon (Kwok Seol-yung), Young-hwa Seo (Eon Deok-nyeo).

 

With his second film, Bong Joon-ho directed his first masterpiece – even if people didn’t seem to quite realize it at the time. The film basically hit the festival circuit for two years, before getting a limited release in North America in 2005, where it didn’t make many waves – but has become a critical favorite since Bong has become an international star director in the wake of his follow-up film (The Host). This is a film that was Zodiac four years before David Fincher directed that masterpiece. And was a forerunner to a number of films in following years about crime, where the close the detectives look at a crime, they less they understand it – and the more obsessed they become, it doesn’t really help them.

 

The film takes place over years – starting in 1986, in rural Korea, where a girl is found raped and murdered in a ditch – and soon after, another woman is found raped and murdered in a field. Korea itself had very little experience dealing with serial killers at that time – and certainly Detective Park Doo-man (Kang-ho Song) has even less experience. He goes on gut instinct and brute force – when they have a suspect, he isn’t above beating a confession out of him, even if that suspect is a mentally handicapped teenager. Soon, though, a Detective from Seoul – Seo Tae-yoon (Sang-kyung Kim) is added to the team, and he has much different – more modern methods of going about the investigation. Not that it helps very much though. As the investigation drags on, more suspects emerge, more bodies are found – and yet, they are no closer to finding out who really committed the murders.

 

The film is a masterclass in tone control by Bong, and his terrific actors. Even though there are murders at the beginning of the film, many early scenes feel almost comic. Park and his partner Cho (Roe-ha Kim) are clearly inept at their job – Park claims he can tell if someone is guilty just by looking him in the eye, and no matter how often he is proven wrong, he keeps thinking the same damn thing. And if he isn’t above beating a confession out of a suspect, he’s a portrait of self-control compared to Cho – who flies into a rage right from the start, and delivers more than one drop kick in the movie, which is almost slapstick. That clash immediately with Seo – hell, they mistake him for a suspect, and beat him too when they first meet. And yet, neither approach to investigating work here.

 

As the film moves along, it gets less comedic. After all, the bodies are piling up – and we start to see some of the murders, including an incredibly haunting, tragic shot of a murder being committed in a forest, as the lights in the distant houses start to go out, one by one. The detectives are haunted by their failures – which of course, leads to more bodies. Some of those failures are theirs and theirs alone – some of them are because of happenstance, like when they need backup because they know the killer will be active, but a pro-democracy rally as taken all the other police out of their control. Suspects are brought in – and they aren’t beaten anymore. The questions start becoming more abstract, even existential.  

 

It’s amazing what this film does in that it makes Park into a truly tragic and yet sympathetic figure. At the start, we see him – see just how bad he is at his job. He is the worst kind of cop – he just wants to get a confession, one way or another. By the end of the film, he is a haunted, broken man. Kang-ho Song has worked with Bong three others times since this (The Host, Snowpiercer and Parasite) – and done brilliant work in other Korean films (Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine is a favorite of mine, but also Park-chan Wook’s Thirst) – but he is truly brilliant in this film.

 

The film starts as a strange police procedural about a serial killer – something we’ve seen so many times since at least 1991 with The Silence of the Lambs, that you have almost grown numb to it. But Bong switches things up from the start to grab your attention, and then simply dives deeper and deeper into the murk as the film moves along – getting at larger truths, both in terms of Korea specifically, and humanity in general. The cinematography by Hyung-Ku Kim is brilliant – using shadows as effectively as I have ever seen. It is quite simply a masterpiece.