• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Apr 21, 2021 Web Exclusive By Jason Wilson

For those encountering Memories of Murder - Bong Joon Ho’s second feature - for the first time in 2021, it should feel like a breath of fresh air, particularly within the well-worn genre of police procedural. Based on a real set of serial killings - and a stage production by Kim Kwang-rim - in rural 1980s South Korea, it has all the hallmarks of a by-the-numbers cop story but it doesn’t give way to convention.

Detective Park Doo-man (Bong regular Song Kang-ho) arrives on the scene where a woman’s body has been found in a ditch, stuck in something like a drainage pipe on the edge of a field. Another woman’s body is found not long after and Detective Park loses control of the crime scene as people tramp all over the ground and a tractor even drives over a footprint that could be used as evidence to identify the killer.

Through word of mouth, Park tracks down a young mentally handicapped man, Baek Kwang-ho, because he used to follow one of the victims around, pining for her over her beauty. For Park, it’s open-and-shut. Obviously, this is the guy who did it. In his mind, it’s as simple as connecting A and B and nothing else matters. Park and his partner Cho Yong-koo (Kim Roi-ha) “interrogate” Baek in an isolated basement in police headquarters, torturing him until he’s been coached well enough to give a confession.

Soon, Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung) arrives from Seoul. He’s a younger detective but more experienced and specifically wanted to volunteer his services to this investigation. Naturally, Park doesn’t take kindly to Seo because of what seems to be a combination of pride and suspicion of the detective from the city. Seo clears Baek, which doesn’t endear him any further to Park, and then more murders happen spinning them all on their heads.

Eventually they find a common ground and are able to work together as they discover the killer waits until rainy nights to strike. One of the few scenes to jump away from the investigation shows a woman walking in a secluded area by rice paddies and there’s a fabulous moment where you could almost miss seeing the killer in the distance because he’s shrouded by shadows and standing perfectly still…until he slowly lowers into the grass. It’s the most unsettling image in the entire film.

Even as they learn to work together, the solution and suspect feel continually out of reach. Seo finds a survivor of the killer and learns that he had very soft hands. Another officer, Kwon Kwi-ok, brings it to their attention that a specific song is requested every time it rains just before the next murder occurs, leading them to another suspect, Park Hyeon-gyu, a factory worker who has noticeably soft hands. Baek, the prior suspect, knew specific details of the murder that Park didn’t feed to him during their torture sessions, which led him to maintain his suspicion. The only other explanation, they wind up reasoning, is that he was a witness and not the killer.

The real case went unsolved for decades before the actual killer was found in 2019, so this movie is not about how police overcame the odds - and their propensity towards human rights violations - to trap a killer. It’s about the unfathomability of the worst of human behavior.

Park asks Seo at one point if he sees cases like this in Seoul. Seo answers that he has never seen anything like this. Even if his mantra that “documents never lie” holds true, and the evidence is really all there right in front of them, there’s still the question of how anyone could ever do this. Park and his cohorts are clearly out of their depth from word one, but even hot-shot city boy Seo loses his grip as his methods prove equally ineffective at actually solving the case, though still preferable to dropkicking suspects during interviews.

There is an occasional slapstick tone to Memories of Murder that may, at first, feel incongruous to its subject matter. It’s really funny in places, morbidly so, and then it’s not. Park, at one point, gets a theory that the killer is hairless below the belt because no pubic hair has been found on the victims. There’s then a cut to him in a bathhouse checking to see if anyone is missing hair down there. But later, we get the sequence that fully breaks Seo as he arrives on the latest crime scene and immediately recognizes the victim.

The tonal shifts require a deft balancing act and it’s a line that is not easily toed. Movies like this are often either entirely self-serious to underscore the gravity of its story or they’ll drift into black comedy where the violence is portrayed for laughs. The in-between is something more rare. Even a movie like David Fincher’s Zodiac, which occasionally gets compared to Bong’s earlier film, is pretty stone-faced by comparison though it’s not without its well-placed levity.

But it’s important to see Park, and even Seo, come off like bumbling fools in the course of their investigation. Cop movies so often portray the investigators as paragons of moral virtue or competency or both, and here they’re neither…at least not in the face of a killer who targets women on rainy nights, strangling them and covering their face with their own underwear.

As far as the Criterion release goes, it’s about time. Memories of Murder was not overly accessible beyond piracy for many years. It’s also, hopefully, a sign that more films from South Korea will be joining the physical collection. According to Criterion’s website, this is only the fourth film from South Korea to get a Criterion spine number after Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (available in volume 1 of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project), Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, and Bong’s Parasite, which just received its release late last year. The Criterion Channel, on the other hand, recently had a wonderful collection of contemporary Korean cinema that included several other Bong titles, but also movies from Park Chan-wook, Kim Jee-woon, Ryoo Seung-wan, and others.

This particular two-disc set includes an interview with filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro where he explains why Memories of Murder is perfect cinema. There is also an interview with Bong where he discusses what the revelation of the killer’s identity means to him and how it might change the perception of his film. Similarly, critic and novelist Ed Park discusses this element in his accompanying essay. There are a couple commentaries - one from the time of release with Bong and some cast and crew - and a making-of documentary. Finally, it also includes Incoherence, a student film of Bong’s from 1994.

Memories of Murder is a unique piece of cinema in a well-trodden genre that subverts expectation and doesn’t fall in the trap of satisfactorily answering every last question, because sometimes we’re left wondering why.

(www.criterion.com/films/31458-memories-of-murder)