Memories of Murder Bong June-Ho South Korea 2003
Bad cop, obnoxious cop and initially nice but then vengeful cop. Being in police custody in connection to an unresolved South Korean manhunt is best avoided. Memories of Murder re-examines the futile investigation of South Korea's first recorded serial killer in the late 1980s. Since the case was unsolved this is a detective drama without a villain, displacing the frustration and anger on the contrasting cops Park Doo-Man (Song Kan-Ho) and Seo Tae-Yoon (Kim Sang-Gyung) assigned the case, and South Korean society in general. Park, the hardnosed local detective, works with instinct and his fists set on obtaining a confession from somebody or increasingly anybody. Seo, a city officer from Seoul, uses more deductive methods. Both approaches fail. Emphasis is placed on a detective trail which exhausts itself due to incompetence and mishap. Lightly hinted at, the South Korean dictatorship of the time may be the redundant body ultimately responsible for this lethal malaise. Opening pastorally with the title credits displayed vertically above a field, the first victim is found raped and strangled in a ditch. Children dart around the crime scene, playing with evidence that could contain forensic clues towards the murderer's identity and taunting the police officer. The ability of Far Eastern films to spin mayhem out of monotony is a welcome technique in a film of recurring knock-backs. Brilliant bursts of frenetic activity and music explode out of nowhere, even in scenes clearly conceiving suspense. Nothing other than frustration is allowed to climax, culminating in a gaunt train track confrontation with yet another nervy suspect.
