Yet, laughs get stuck in throats as one woman after another is murdered.Īs a portrait of regret and madness, Memories of Murder still resonates. Park and his associates bumble one lead after another, a ridiculous comedy of errors about the fallibility of mankind. Meanwhile, the police chief and others slide down on their butts as they descend from the road to the field. While a girl lies murdered in a rice paddy, a tractor runs over key evidence. Consider an early scene when Park is trying to protect a crime scene. Memories of Murder is an emotional tightrope, especially as Bong nimbly shifts from abject horror to outright comedy. Bong broke through with his first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), setting him up as an exciting new cinematic voice.
Many of these films featured graphic violence, moved quickly and established a new filmic language that enticed foreign viewers hungry for something different. And while Seo is a better cop than Park, setting up a rivalry between the two men, a shadow of violence rests under his calm veneer.īong, along with directors such as Park Chan-wook and Hong Sang-soo, is part of the New Korean Cinema, a movement that took place from the late ‘90s and into the late ‘00s that redefined the type of films made in South Korea, allowing for auteurism and creative new ways to tell a story. After more girls turn up murdered, Inspector Seo Tae-Yoon (Kim Sang Kyung) is sent from Seoul to assist the flailing local force. His partner, Jo Yong-Gu (Kim Roe Ha) is little more than hotheaded thug who does little else than stomp on people during interrogations, using a special cover on his boot to protect his footwear from blood. Park is also not above beating confessions out witnesses and planting evidence. He claims that he has the eyes of a shaman, able to pierce the soul and establish guilt. Park Doo-Man (Bong regular Song Kang Ho) is the bumbling detective leading the investigation. While the killer in Memories of Murder is methodical, calculating and restrained, the local police assigned to catching him are precisely the opposite. While knowing that the perpetrator eventually is caught changes the ending of Memories of Murder a bit, it also adds a new layer to an undeniably powerful motion picture. However, the unsolved cases (and the film) received some closure in 2019 when Lee Chun-jae, arrested for a 1994 crime, confessed not only to the 10 girls raped and murdered near the town of Hwaseong, but five more killings and an additional 30 rapes.
#MEMORIES OF A MURDERER SERIES#
Available now on disc from the Criterion Collection and streaming on Hulu at this time, this once-difficult to find and haunting film deserves to be widely recognized as one of the director’s best.īased on a series of rapes and murders that occurred outside of Seoul in the ‘80s, Memories of Murder initially served as a ghostly reminder of justice unserved.
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#MEMORIES OF A MURDERER MOVIE#
Now that Bong Joon Ho has broken through in the United States as an A-list director – first piquing curiosity in his monster movie The Host (2006), directing Chris Evans in the violent dystopia Snowpiercer (2013) and winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards with Parasite (2019) – American cinephiles should return to the South Korean director’s sophomore feature, the chilling police procedural, Memories of Murder (2003).
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