How can one write about Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 film Memories of Murder without being moved to tears at the sheer horror of it all? Taking place in the 1980s, Memories of Murder centers on Detectives Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho), Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), and Cho Yong-koo (Kim Roe-ha) racing to catch South Korea’s first serial killer, a man in the countryside who rapes and murders women who wear red on rainy nights. When regular interrogation and torture fail, police begin to use any method they can, gather anyone who could possibly be guilty, but still the murderer continues to strike. The clash between the country detectives Park and Cho and Seoul transfer Seo proves to be an obstacle further along in the case, and as every method fails, personalities shift and fights erupt. Director Bong’s film is a high tension ride of a thriller, always leaving the viewer guessing just as much as the detectives.
Brutality oozes out of every inch of the film, the wounds festering to create a chilling atmosphere. With Neon’s remaster, this 17-year-old film looks phenomenally modern, every grotesque texture captured beautifully by Kim Hyung-koo’s camera. At times the viewer has the reflex to look away at these horrors, but this remaster compels and enriches the visuals so much it feels like its own crime to not bask in the muted edge of the film, only accentuated by the bright reds that mark the victims of the killer.
The performances are career-defining work from everyone involved, but especially by Song and Kim, whose character dynamic takes such a sharp pivot by the film’s climax it becomes almost hard to remember how normal these detectives were at the film’s beginning. Song gives a deceptively oafish performance, leaving the audience to question: is Detective Park the nuanced expert he claims, or a fool using brutality to exert power over others? Kim gives the character of Detective Seo such a cold, intricate personality that it’s easy to look to him as the expert, but even he begins to crack and shatter, and by his final scene one can’t help but fear him.
Bong’s film, as he states, is about the haunting memory of this real-life murderer, the haunting reality of the failures and victims that remain etched in the minds of the detectives, the victims’ families, and even the country itself. As the story unfolds, this memory haunts viewers, from the brutalized corpses of victims to the horrifying torture Park and Cho carry out on suspects. On every front, this follows Bong’s idea that all of his films are monster movies — but this monster is invisible.
The films of Bong always have a greater commentary on an issue we all recognize as omnipresent and he makes them identifiable with genre fiction conventions. The Host criticizes American imperialism through the use of a literal monster; Snowpiercer captures wealth inequality in its most extreme form by placing rich people in the front of a train and poor people in the back, and Okja fights against environmental degradation and megacorporations using an otherworldly creature as the target of those in power. Memories, though, takes the far more horrifying approach, with realism at the forefront in order to capture an invisible horror. The monster, as it were, is a complex web of systems that interconnect to oppress.
The monster is violence, masculinity, patriarchy. At every turn our detectives fail because of patriarchal trappings, between in-fighting for dominance to using violence rather than their minds to get their way. At one point Detective Park says that in Korea, detectives use their feet, and the American FBI use their minds; this is reflexive of his opposite approach to Seo, who relies on evidence, forensics, and quiet stakeouts. By the film’s end, though, Seo is just as brutal as Park, who has now become more immersed in the proof they need rather than the easy answers and media praise, and he uses this rage to attack the innocent. Our monster is a brutal murderer who reflects the same torturous methods as our heroes, but he’s faceless, a swift shadow, the fear of him captured in the fact he is all around us, an ordinary system, an ordinary ideology, an ordinary man.
