Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok) begins and ends in the same place: an amber rice field in rural South Korea that is split down the middle by a dirt road and a concrete culvert. It is within that culvert that the first of the film’s numerous female murder victims is found—bound, strangled, and covered with insects. It is here that we first meet Detective Park Doo-man (Kang-ho Song), who becomes the lead investigator of what turns out to be a serial murder case—the first in South Korea’s history. And, at the end of the film, he returns to this culvert by chance, squatting down and looking into it just as he did 17 years earlier. There is no body there this time, but there are also still no answers, which makes the film’s static final image of Park staring directly into the camera so unrelentingly haunting.

In between those two scenes, Bong weaves a compelling narrative that is part police procedural, part political critique, and part examination of toxic misogyny in Korean culture. The story is based on true events, the first recognized series of serial murders in South Korea, which began in 1986 and went unsolved until (coincidentally) the year the film was released. It was Bong’s second feature, following the comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), and in many ways it presages his subsequent films, particularly the Cannes- and Oscar-winning Parasite (2019). Memories of Murder is visually and narratively impressive, as it finds a consistently engaging balance between the horrors of the (true life) serial murders, the tragically comic ineptitude of the investigating police, and the lethal political environment of President Chun Doo-hwan’s military rule under which it unfolds.

Detective Park is joined in the investigation by Detective Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), who is brought in from Seoul. Detective Seo is a more experienced and patient investigator and one who is firmly committed to the process and to science, whereas Detective Park and his partner, Detective Cho Young-koo (Roe-ha Kim), are more inclined to drag in any suspect that fits the profile and rough them up until they confess something. The pressure to find the culprit is so intense that they are willing twist evidence and manufacture confessions if it will present the appearance of success.

The tension in the investigation weighs heavily on an urban/rural divide, with the former associated with a more rigorous and controlled process of investigation, whereas the latter is based on hunches, intimidation, and violence. And all the while there is a smart female officer, Officer Kwon Kwi-ok (Seo-hie Ko), who offers numerous crucial insights, including the recognition that the murders always take place after the playing of a particular requested song on the radio, but is summarily dismissed by the male investigators simply because she is a woman. The continued failures of the investigation and the accumulation of bodies begins to take its toll, and Memories of Murder slowly but surely morphs into a portrait of utter frustration, culminating in a tense scene framed by a dark railway tunnel in which it appears that Detective Seo is ready to forfeit all of his legitimacy as a police officer to put a bullet in the suspect he is convinced—perhaps correctly, perhaps out of sheer desperation—is guilty. Bong, who cowrote the screenplay with Sung-bo Shim (Sea Fog), teases us with the possibility of solving the murder while also dragging us through the difficulties of making it all add up. And all the while we see the killer at work, always just off screen or partially obscured or represented only by his gaze, methodically tracking and killing women on rainy nights.

Even at this early stage in his career, Bong was proving himself to be a master of both style and tone. Memories of Murder is replete with indelible images and masterful compositions, as well as tense moments that straddle the thin line between thrillers and outright horror. It is at times darkly humorous, but Bong is always ready to undercut our comfort, reminding us that lives are at stake and the system in place to protect them is barely coherent at best, fundamentally corrupt at worst. Scenes of political violence serve to underscore the importance of a society investing in its systems of protection, which here are barely stitched together and sadly lacking in resources. Memories of Murder is, at its core, a harrowing portrait of desperation and systemic failure. Its final moments drive home, through nothing more than brief dialogue and an exchange of looks, how the worst horrors are often sitting right beside us. Monsters, as it turns out, look just like everyone else.

Copyright © 2021 James Kendrick

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