Near the beginning of Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder, Detective Park Doo-man is challenged by a fellow police officer to live up to his brags of being able to identify a criminal merely by visual inspection, which they presume to be guesswork. At a distance, Doo-man eyes them up. We patiently wait to see if his psychic claim is accurate, but the scene ends before a conclusion is determined; we’re left hanging on an answer. The scene cuts to Park Doo-man in his dingy apartment having sex with a woman on a mattress. The sudden cut from supposed superhero ability to something completely different is so jarring and speaks loud things about his vacant character, his inability to concentrate, to focus, to live up to expectations, and contrarily, his ability to change the subject. Already, Bong Joon-ho has challenged a stereotype that we’ve become so used to; the cop that’s different from the rest because of some intrinsic, second nature ability that the others do not share. In the case of Memories of Murder, from the offset, it’s fairly called out as bulls**t.
Films I refer to/potentially spoil in this article:
- Memories of Murder (dir. Bong Joon Ho, 2003)
- Seven Samurai (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
- Dazed and Confused (dir. Richard Linklater, 1994)
- Local Hero (dir. Bill Forsyth, 1983)
- La Haine (dir. Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995)
However, to introduce Doo-man as consistently unable to deliver would be unfair. Despite his overly casual appearance and aura of nonchalance for a high-ranking detective, he’s admittedly good at what he does; or he’s at least able to convince us that possesses the attributes required for such a role. Simultaneously, this works to our advantage too, as his attributes of humour, confidence verging on stubbornness, and unrelenting perseverance makes him a fantastic character to study and watch for the films duration. Similarly, his colleagues are equally as distinct and comedic and consequently memorable. If Park Doo-man is a good cop, then Detective Cho Yong-koo is the bad cop counterbalance. He (literally) jumps at any opportunity to flying-kick a potential suspect, whilst Sergeant Shin Dong-chul parents the unit until his own immaturities and peaked stress levels intervene. The characters are satisfyingly balanced, simultaneously depicted as captivating and complex individuals, yet these complexities aren’t unnecessarily delved into. We can enjoy their company at a surface level. They can be simplified to their archetypal templates, i.e., the one who drinks too much, the one who is silly etc. but never to the extent where they are reduced to boring comic caricatures. The result is an ensemble that you won’t necessarily know the ins and outs of after the film finishes, but you will feel like you’ve known them a long time. Think the seven samurai of Seven Samurai, or the bittersweetly-minded youths in Dazed and Confused.
The task of the team is to investigate the crimes of an elusive serial killer who is striking terror across South Korea. The serial killer leaves the bodies of young women decorated in gruesome ways, often in an undignified heap in a field or hidden off a path somewhere. Due to the untraceable nature of the threat of further attacks, a detective is brought to the team to assist. Detective Seo Tae-yoon, a hotshot from Seoul is the smart and sophisticated cop to Park Doo-man’s good cop and Cho Yong-koo’s bad cop. He sits away from the others in the office, doesn’t engage with social activities and picks up on all the things the others fail to notice, but as confined and conventional as this character may seem, he’s no less addictively encapsulating to observe. His discipline and expertise completely counteract the methods of the locals; think of it as a serial-killer-cop-film version of Local Hero. It’s a wonderful utilisation of the outsider effect, and despite its on-paper conventionality, it remains a wholly unique and distinctive entry to the genre.
In the best way possible, Memories of Murder feels like a student film with an all-star cast and blockbuster budget. Each frame of the film is so satisfyingly considered and composed, delicately articulated to connote visual storytelling. Scenes that feature multiple characters sharing a scene also features them sharing the screen. There’s a triumphant lack of over-shoulder shots and by-the-books relaying between who is and who isn’t speaking. Instead, similar to the immaculate, tableaux-like composition of Barry Lyndon, plentiful thought is dedicated to arranging everyone and everything’s positioning. As opposed to removing silent characters, they may be lingering in the background doing something else that builds their character reacting to the central focus of the scene or adding to their character if there’s a blatant lack of focus. Meanwhile, speaking characters take centre-stage at the centre of the screen. It’s a real life application of what media teachers preached to us at school; if a characters faces to the left, what does this indicate? Grief? Regression? The past? Thankfully, it’s not as laborious as that sounds, nor is it that paint-by-numbers. It certainly is an excellent and refreshing take on conventional framing methods, though.
The wonderful cinematography isn’t restricted to this theatrical style of staging either. Camerawork and direction match the energy of each scene. The handful of chase sequences are shot running alongside the detectives, while intense scenes of interrogation are presented with slow and steady camera push-ins, naturally aiding in the building of dread, of what eventualities may come from the confessions. And the confessions are plentiful, but inconsistent and unreliable. Notoriously, and on numerous occasions, do the detectives push their targets to the point of near insanity. Physical and psychological torturing upon their suspects pushes both parties to respective limits where exhausted attempts at denial eventually turn into acceptance, relentless affirmations that they must have killed the girls because they’ve been told they have done repeatedly for the past few days. This immoral defect is explored and pushed to the limits throughout the film, leading to some incredible scenes of turbulent and unprecedented behaviour, like any great serial killer thriller should be. There are miscalculations, promising leads, emotional ties, and, perhaps most importantly, collective, personal indifference. If all the cops were to agree on one thing at a time, what would be discovered? Nothing. Conflict is the tripwire that allows our protagonists to stumble and fall, and enjoyment is gained through watching them scramble to elegantly recover from their failures. As the mantra of La Haine tells us, what doesn’t matter is how you fall, but how you land.
And what a landing Memories of Murder is. Eventually, the active battle of which cop will come out on top is nullified. To twist the conventional cop film again, the conclusion reached reveals that nobody is right, and nobody is wrong. Everyone is left hanging. A startling ending shows that the detectives have made little to no progress in establishing who the killer is, their own devices of psychological harassment backfiring. A prime suspect proves impossible to read, even to Park Doo-man’s stare-down superpower. Many years later, we see Doo-man as a different man entirely; a salesman with a family and a decent home, starkly mirroring his life from the beginning of the film. However, on a business trip, he passes the first crime scene from all those years ago. A morbid sense of nostalgia and an inability to shake his past failure takes over, as he wanders straight to the gutter where the corpse lay. Here, a small girl asks him what he’s looking for and drops the bomb that she saw someone else looking down there the other day, perhaps another man of nostalgia, but for a different reason, to the girl’s devastatingly vague description of him as “plain” and “ordinary”. The film closes with the detective demonstrating his signature stare-into-the-camera to determine the killer. What’s even more heart-wrenching is that allegedly, Bong Joon-ho did this as he felt certain the killer on which the film is based upon would be in the theatre watching and laughing at this semi-biographical film. This closing shot was a reminder that he had not been forgotten, the victims had not been forgotten and they were still searching for him. It’s immensely powerful, even more so when paired with the film’s fantastic soundtrack, fuelled by tragic, doubtful hope and enraged determination.
Memories of Murder is a strangely cosy film, and I’m not one that generally gains relaxation or enjoyment from binging Netflix serial killer and true crime documentaries. Despite its horrific subject matters, a great chemistry between a highly characteristic ensemble bunched up in rooms while storms surge from day-to-day makes Memories of Murder an essential viewing experience. Although thematically coherent in its police sub-genre, Memories of Murder completely owns its own take on the conventions, staying firmly within the boundaries but not succumbing to being like everything else before it. It understands that you’re interested in the characters and their lives nearly as much as you are in finding out who the killer is, and it balances this perfectly, granting a generous amount of explorable freedom either way. In this freedom, however, mysteries are aplenty, and nothing is fully answered. We never know the ins and outs of each detective’s personal lives, love lives, dreams, past failures, and likewise, we jump from prime suspect to prime suspect, never quite fully understanding if we just learned anything of importance. But, due to great characterisation and a near-perfect immersion which will leave you looking back on the film with an ambient, dream/nightmare-like nostalgia and lived familiarity, we know there is more there, we just don’t need to see it all to enjoy it.
filmmish 