A steady hand at work
Parasite director's earlier approach in police drama shows same assurance
It's always odd watching an older movie from a well-known director. Sometimes the early film doesn't measure up to whatever new work brought them recognition.
Not so with Memories of Murder. The 2003 film was just the second feature from Korean director Bong Joon Ho, and the first collaboration between him and actor Kang-ho Song. Sixteen years later, their fourth film together would win four Academy Awards including best picture. That was Parasite.
But Memories of Murder, with its razor-sharp editing and tightly wound plot, already shows the hallmarks of a capable, confident filmmaker. The first scene opens in the autumn of 1986 on what looks to be an idyllic farmer's field, with children scampering about. But something is amiss. Detective Park (Kang) arrives to investigate a body that has been stashed in a drainage ditch.
He and Detective Cho (Roe-ha Kim) put their heads together, and decide a local, intellectually disabled young man is their prime suspect. When a crucial piece of evidence is accidentally destroyed, they simply re-create it as they see fit.
Enter Detective Seo (Sangkyung Kim), sent from Seoul to help crack the case. He confidently announces they're investigating not two murders but three, and points to a recently vanished woman as fitting the same profile as the other victims. Sure enough, her body is found, but the police are no closer to solving the case.
Bong is working from an actual string of murders in his country in the 1980s, and from a play that dramatized them. The timeframe is vital to the story. A further killing takes place during an air-raid drill, still common today but even more so then. Another happens when all the local police are busy putting down a student demonstration. And when the detectives decide to try DNA analysis, they have to send samples to the U.S. since the technology doesn't yet exist in Korea.
Adding to the drama is the mistrust felt by Park and Cho — a real good cop/ bad cop team, with Cho's preferred method of interrogation a flying kick to the upper body — toward their urban colleague. Maybe it's the fact that Seo is a vegetarian. Maybe it's that he went to university for four years, while Park only did two, and Cho had four straight years but all of them in Grade 9.
Suffice to say their methods differ drastically — though as time passes, victims pile up and one suspect after another fails to pan out, even Seo starts to lash out in frustration.
The actors are truly believable in their roles, as are the minor characters of the hard-drinking chief, and the mostly ignored female officer Kwon, whose habit of listening to the radio may yet provide the break they need.
You can look up the true story behind Memories of Murder, which briefly resurfaced in the news last year, but you're better off going into this dramatization with as little information as possible. The less you know, the more powerful will be the film's final scene, a haunting conclusion to an excellent movie, and a promise (already delivered!) of more to come.