Memories of Murder (Preview)
Reviewed by Thomas Doherty

Produced by Tchai Sung Jai; directed by Bong Joon Ho; screenplay by Bong Joon Ho and Shim Sung Bo from an original story by Kim Gwang Rim; cinematography by Kim Hyung Ku; edited by Kim Sun Min; music by Taro Iwashiro; starring Song Kang Ho, Kim Sang Kyung, Byun Hee Bong, Song Jae Ho, Kim Roe Ha, Koh Seo Hee, and Park No Shik. A two-disc Blu-ray or DVD, color, 131 min., Korean dialogue with English subtitles, 2003. A Criterion Collection release.

In 1986, the bodies of women began turning up in Hwaseong, a small community in Gyeonggi Province, south of Seoul. The first body, nude and trussed, was stuffed in the culvert of a drainage ditch, the second left in a rice field. There would be eight more female victims in a killing spree that lasted until 1991.

The most sensational serial killer case in South Korean history serves as the scaffolding for a moody police procedural in which the case is not closed, the killer is not caught, and the detectives are left broken and bereft. In this, the film is faithful to the source material, but director Bong Joon Ho’s journey into the true crime genre also seems in tune with a nation that has endured too much murderous history to embrace neat wrap-ups and happy endings. A country cut in half at the center has few expectations of unifying closure.

A work of extraordinary precision and control, Memories of Murder is only the second feature film from Bong, the generic polymath whose credits include The Host (2006), a monster movie about a CGI-toxic avenger sprung from the Han River; Snowpiercer (2013), an off the rails express train stopping at dystopia; and the class-conscious social commentary Parasite (2019), which in wrenching the Best Picture Oscar from Hollywood confirmed that the cinematic tributary of the Korean cultural wave (hallyu) is as strong as K-pop and K-drama. The timely Criterion Blu-ray release arrives in the afterglow of Bong’s coup, but its main purpose is to bring the cold case file up to date and address the postrelease twist that will forever filter the film’s reception.  

The film begins with a body. The first detective on scene, Park Doo Man (played by the beloved Song Kang Ho, now known to American audiences as the patriarch of the con-man family in Parasite) initially seems a bit of a buffoon, neither streetwise investigator nor plodding factotum, disrespected even by the child he tells to scram from the crime scene. He smacks around suspects, plants evidence, and runs down bad leads. His volatile, none-too-bright partner, Jo (Kim Roe Ha), who prefers to pummel perps with his feet, not his fists, seems less a sidekick than an impediment. They are lower echelon, white-collar salarymen more at home slugging back soju than rolling off police tape. The discovery of a second victim reveals what Park is up against: a swirling long take shows the chaos and confusion of the crime scene, trampled over and tumbled into, a tableau more festive than forensic.

Brought in to supplement the literally clueless locals is the hotshot from Seoul, university educated Inspector Seo (Kim Sang Kyung), handsomer and smarter than the two yokels, presumably the ratiocinator– hero who will bring FBI-caliber expertise to the primitive backwater and crack the case. It is Seo, however, whom the case will crack.

Park and Seo (rather too neatly) represent two different ways of understanding the world. Park relies on instinct and claims to possess a shaman-like ability to see into a man’s soul by looking into his eyes, to tell the innocent from the guilty, a boast quickly undercut by his boss who points to two men sitting side by side in the police office. One is a rapist, the other the victim’s brother—which is which? Seo is no less blinkered by his own outlook. A just-the-facts-ma’am type, he puts his faith in documents (“they never lie”) and assumes that the diligent accumulation of evidence will lead to the killer. The rivals butt heads, converge, and ultimately switch temperaments.  

As Seo scours the print record, Park and Jo persist in doing things the old-fashioned way: drag a scum suspect into the basement boiler room and beat a confession out of him, business as usual in the rough authoritarian atmosphere of late-1980s South Korea. Also true to the time is the treatment of the fourth detective on the team, a woman, Officer Kwon (Koh Seo Hee), a subaltern presence, serving coffee to the men, unobtrusively competent (she gently interrogates a female victim) and gutsy (she plays bait for the killer). Bong depicts the patriarchal Confucianism of Korean culture with no fuss and no lectures. When the boys go out for a drunken night of kalbi, Crown beer, and karaoke, she is not invited along.

In keeping with the protocols of the true crime genre, the film follows the detectives down rabbit holes and tosses out red herrings—urban legends, fortune-tellers, and dead ends that have the detectives checking out outhouses and bathhouses alike. One of the conventions of the genre is that no one ever yells “cut to the chase.” …

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