Mic dropkick
Rape and murder are not funny. But Memories of Murder is a funny movie without ever undercutting the gravity of the crimes its protagonists are investigating. This is one of the tensions of Bong Joon Ho’s second film, his critical breakout. Cho Yong-koo (Kim Roi-ha), a local cop who previously has had to deal only with petty burglaries and drunken thugs, believes every illegal act can be solved by dropkicking a suspect. It is never not funny to see Cho come running in frame, then launching himself in the air at a potential criminal. Later in the film, Cho’s reckless use of violence comes to the forefront, and he’s suspended from the force for brutality. He grows despondent and alcoholic, and gets stabbed in a bar fight with a rusty nail. His dropkicks against innocent victims are not so funny now. Except they still are. It’s terrific slapstick, and it’s capricious violence. It’s both; a tension.
This is not the only one of Memories of Murder’s tensions. The film, which is set in an outskirt town of Seoul that is unnamed but inspired by Hwaesong, also considers the push and pull between intuitive truth and measurable truth. The film’s two leads are rural detective Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho, a frequent Bong collaborator), who knows the town and its people well, and Seoul investigator Seo Tae-yoon, (Kim Sang-kyung) who uses more evidence-based forensic techniques. They repeatedly butt heads during the investigation. A narratively satisfying approach to this pairing would be a pendulum swing where each investigator is right sometimes and wrong sometimes, their approaches ultimately marrying in a conclusive finale wherein the detectives apprehend the villain and justice is served. But Memories of Murder is not designed with this conventional rhythm. Instead, the intuitive Park is repeatedly wrong, or at least incomplete in his conclusions, while Seo finds truth in the precision of details. Yet just when this theme locks into place, of big-city procedure trumping small-town instinct, the finale rips it from the investigators’ hands, asking the viewers to reconsider whether Park was maybe right in the first place. Maybe truth is something that you see in a person’s eyes even when evidence can’t definitively back it up.
Like most great crime stories, Memories of Murder is not just a procedural unfolding of a case, but an investigation into the human soul and its various shades of darkness. For Bong Joon Ho, peering into man’s violent impulses is synonymous with reckoning with the systems that shaped him. As a university student and young adult, Bong was a protester against the oppressive, anti-progress Korean government during the late ‘80s when this is set. About two-thirds into the runtime of Memories of Murder, Park and Seo find a traumatized woman who survived a violent attack, and she flees from them. As viewers, we do not blame her: She was brutalized both by a cruel man and by a system that did not notice or care that she had suffered. The only recognition she received was as a local ghost story told by middle school students. Even surviving the attack, she lot much of her humanity. As the nation languishes, so does this town, and so does its people.
The film, based on a string of real-life, headline-grabbing murders, opens with a scene that captures its tonal juggling in a nutshell: Park and Cho arrive at a crime scene harrowing ugliness: a dead woman, the killer’s first victim, is bound and gagged with her undergarments, stuffed in a coffin-shaped drain pipe, and crawling with insects all over her flesh. The local cops are equal parts stunned at the cruelty of the scene and miffed at the commotion interfering with their job: locals show up, mostly unfazed and curious, disrupting evidence. It’s a well-orchestrated comic scene that would be a wacky Keystone Cops routine if not for the mutilated corpse at its center.
The detectives bungle the early portions of the investigation to a point that it would again be hilarious if not for the stakes. Park and Cho round up the usual suspects and canvas for leads. They hear a rumor that a man with cognitive problems, Baek Kwang-ho (Park No-shik), had a history of pestering one victim. They arrest him and smack him around until he confesses. Everyone declares the case closed, until Seoul hotshot Seo pokes his head in, spends about 10 seconds reviewing the facts of the cases, and determines Baek is not the culprit. From there, Seo and Park make uneasy partners, each eventually learning to reign in the other’s worst habits as the case spirals to its resolution. (Cho hangs around for comic relief.) We slowly gather that Park is a cop not because he’s passionate about serving justice, but because it was one career path in front of him, and took the job the way one might become a plumber or school teacher. Seo, meanwhile, has bound his identity in cracking cases and has some neuroses you typically see in the detective genre.
Every beat of the investigation, right until the last 20 minutes, seems pretty conventional on paper. And to some extent, each one is conventional. But it never feels quite right. It unfolds arrhythmically and in spurts, as if the movie is as baffled at the unlikelihood and cruelty of the serial rapes and murders as the residents of the small town are. Sitcom and farce beats are interrupted by new murders, and vice versa. Rain becomes a harbinger of doom, as Seo quickly identifies the killer only attacks during bad weather.
The film’s closing stretch is its strongest and bleakest, and it bumps the film up a tier. Every bit of levity has curdled into an abyss of dread, captured in a stirring shot of train track tunnel. The tunnel is a mouth of darkness, swallowing everything good and innocent outside it, portending doom and destruction that might strike like a freight train.
Is history a spoiler? I don’t know. You might want to stop reading if you don’t know the full story for this string of real-life 1980s murders in Hwaesong and are spoiler-averse. But I will proceed on the assumption that you are familiar with the broad outlines of the case and, therefore, the conclusion of Memories of Murder.
This film debuted in 2003, and Bong based it off of a 1996 play dramatizing a real investigation into a serial killer. As of the release of the play and the film, these murders were unsolved. The serial killer ran free. Finally, in 2019, police arrested a man named Lee Choon-jae for the crimes from three decades earlier. He confessed and is serving life in prison. But this happened well after Bong’s movie premiered. (In fact, many authorities and media outlets credit the film for keeping interest in the case alive.) Thus, Memories of Murder ends with the case unsolved. A flash-forward coda shows how life goes on even as evil lurks. The abyss remains. Park remembers the high stakes investigation as part nostalgia, part nightmare. The final shot is one that might be a gimmick in a lesser film, but here punctuates many of the film’s complex ideas: Evil doesn’t lie in one man’s soul, but in a system that we all collectively support, one that has failed us as much as we’ve failed it. We get no firm answer, but Bong challenges us to figure out who (and how) we can implicate in violence both petty and murderous, both individual and systemic, even if it means looking in the mirror.
Bong’s filmmaking is tremendous all throughout Memories of Murder. He has taken the spinning plates balancing act of distinct tones from Barking Dogs Never Bite and exploded it into the raison d’être of a crime story. The timing of bursts of darkness or comedy are concussive. Most impressive are the blocking and construction of interior scenes in the police station and buildings around town: they are claustrophobic and precisely designed, foreshadowing his world-class interior set pieces in Parasite.
The leap from Bong’s first film to his second is remarkable. Memories of Murder is a legitimately great film. It is often frustrating and repetitive: Park is so haphazard as a cop, he’s unlikable, and the whole department’s series of blunders is exhausting. But when the film is unsatisfying, it’s always in a provocative way, a reminder of the clash between two cops stumbling to solve a mystery out of their league and to confront the gaping darkness they uncover. A tension.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.