Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 feature 살인의 추억 (Memories of Murder) is an example of a familiar genre made unfamiliar in its trappings, at least at first. Initially, this is because it is set in the yesteryear of 1986—and, as L.P. Hartley noted in his 1953 novel The Go-Between, “the past is a foreign country” where things are done differently—but also because it takes place in the South Korean city of Hwaseong. It follows two police officers on opposite ends of the scale of corruption who, because of the depravity and darkness of the crimes that they are investigating, eventually exchange places on this spectrum. Detective Park (Song Kang-ho) is local to Hwaseong and is the lead on the investigation into a nascent series of serial assaults and murders on women in the community, and Detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung) has been sent from Seoul to assist after the discovery of a second body. There’s some jurisdictional friction between the two, including a vigorous discussion about the lack of a national investigative agency like the U.S. has with the FBI. (A useful note here: S. Korea’s National Police Agency wasn’t founded until 1991, and during the time in which this film is set, this would theoretically have fallen under the auspices of the National Security Headquarters, but with Chun Doo-hwan and his junta in power, it’s a wonder that Seo was even sent.) Their biggest difference, however, lies in their approaches. Park may not be as violent or hot-tempered as his partner, another local detective named Cho (Kim Roi-ha), but his apathy about justice is in many ways worse; it’s clear that Cho is driven by his temper and his aggression, while Park’s casual treatment of, for instance, the elicitation of a false confession in order to close the case, demonstrates that performing that kind of quotidian evil is driven by nothing more than the banality of doing one’s job. Seo, in contrast, is more evidence and psychology driven, and sees through Park and Cho’s arrest of an innocent man with developmental disabilities and the rehearsed admission of guilt that he recites in Seo’s presence. 

As I was thinking about how I would open my review while watching the film, a phrase came to mind about how the world that these characters inhabit is so unlike our own, where police brutality is so naked and unafraid, where violence and torture are commonplace means of maintaining the status quo. Then I remembered that we do live in that world. A girls’ school is visited in the film by one of the investigators, and the students there are practicing drills on how to escape from deadly attack and provide each other with first aid in the event of violence on the school grounds. Cho, the very same detective who has a special boot cover for when he is kicking prisoners to avoid leaving obvious marks, grows enraged when a local eatery’s television displays a report about a Seoul officer being indicted for similar actions, and he both destroys the television and physically attacks the students there who cheer on justice being served, protesting too much. Even the “good cop” Seo sits by idly while Park and Cho hang a suspect upside down, only becoming involved when the man says something that provides an epiphanic deduction. Park, an unapologetically bad cop, thinks he has some kind of preternatural sense that allows him to discern when someone is guilty or not, a frightening look into how someone can get the idea that they can sense other people’s spirits and then mete out punishment on them based on their own preconceptions. What Bong was saying in 2003 about both the contemporary present of the film’s production and about the 1986 on which it focused is the same thing that he’s still saying about the distant past, the near past, and today: “Essentially,” he said in 2019, “we all live in the same country called capitalism.” The S. Korea of 2003 is the present United States is S. Korea in 1986, and it’s jackboots all the way down. 

For those who haven’t seen the film, a brief synopsis: Detectives Park and Cho, under orders from Sergeant Shin (Song Jae-ho), partner with Seoul city detective Seo when the body of a woman is found in a roadside culvert, the second victim of a potential serial killer. The two local detectives physically torture Kwang-ho (Park No-shik), their first prime suspect, the mentally handicapped and physically scarred son of a local restaurateur. They take him out to the woods to force him to dig a hole under the pretense that he is digging his own grave if he does not confess, and he does so, into a tape recorder. Seo is not convinced by any of this and, much to Shin’s chagrin, finds evidence that exonerates the man, embarrassing Park and Cho. Seo connects the dots on the fact that both women were murdered in the rain to a missing person case for a woman who also disappeared on a rainy night, and he is able to turn the search to a specific area and a search team finds her body relatively quickly, further driving a wedge between Park and Seo, the former of whom thinks the latter looks down on him as a comparative bumpkin. A trap is laid for the killer the next evening that it rains, but it fails; although Officer Kwon (Go Seo-hee), who was used as bait, fails to draw out the killer, she does discover a link between the nights of the murders, the rain, and a series of postcards to a local radio station that requests the song “Sad Letter” be played when it’s a rainy day. An accidental sting operation at the location where the fourth body was found leads to the arrest of the next prime suspect, Jo (Ryu Tae-Ho), while a follow up on the song requests leads to another, Park Hyeon-gyu (Park Hae-il). Jo is Park’s collar, and he grows infuriated when Seo finds proof of the man’s innocence, once again enraged that his case closure has been torn out of his hands, and Hyeon-gyu is Park’s man, but there’s no solid proof and even some physical evidence that seems to exonerate him. I wouldn’t consider any of this a spoiler, though, because although this is a crime thriller, it’s not a mystery, even though it occasionally wears one’s clothes. 

Like the crime on which it was based (at least at the time of release), the killer is not found in this film. He’s present in the movie, in peripheral glances and blurred visions of final moments, but we never see his face and the police never apprehend him. The final scenes of the film, which take place in 2003, find Park returning to the road where the opening scene took place and staring into the culvert in which the second victim’s body was found, seventeen years older and now a small kitchen appliance salesman. A little girl asks him what he’s doing and tells him that another man was there a few weeks prior, also looking into the same space and, upon being asked, said he was remembering something that he did there a long time before, implying that the killer is still loose, but history ended up proving this one wrong. As it turns out, the Hwaseong serial killer had actually been in prison since 1994, for killing his sister-in-law, and he was prompted to confess to the Hwaseong killings upon the discovery of further DNA evidence to confess in 2019. This doesn’t hurt the film in any way, but I don’t want to leave pedant bait out there in the open like that. 

This movie is beautifully shot, and the action is often kinetic and fun. Clocking in at 2 hours and 10 minutes, I can see how some of the scenes in the middle could feel like the film is going in circles if you don’t have the attention span for a film of that length, but I never felt like the film was spinning its wheels. There are countless independent pieces at play here that add up into a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Some of the police violence can be hard to stomach, and without some knowledge of S. Korean politics of the 1980s there are probably some details in the film’s metaphorical filigree that are lost. Even if you don’t, the violence of the police against protestors and students speaks for itself, as does the way that different members of the institution behave, with Cho being more violent than before and Shin growing increasingly furious that his subordinates are disobeying his direct orders to show restraint while they are under the microscope. It’s familiar even if the time and place are foreign to you, because we do all live in one national police state. If you can stomach that, this is a masterpiece you should see as soon as you can. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond