#223: Memories of Murder

Release Date: May 2nd, 2003

Format: Criterion Collection on Blu-ray

Written by: Bong Joon Ho and Shim Sung-bo

Directed by: Bong Joon Ho

4 Stars

Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder is a detective procedural set in a rural South Korean town where two young women have been found raped and murdered, their bodies dumped in the surrounding fields. The lead detectives, simple-minded Park and the hot-headed Cho, are in over their heads. They can find very little evidence at the crime scenes, and even less motive.

After unsuccessfully trying to pin the murder on the town idiot, a new detective, Seo, is brought in from Seoul to aid in the investigation. Seo has ideas: Both women were wearing red on the nights of their murder, both were killed in the rain, and on both nights the same obscure song was requested on the local radio station. Knowing this, maybe they can successfully bait the murderer into a sting?

What I admire about Memories of Murder is that it works well on this procedural level. It’s fun watching this motley crew of detectives chase leads, fight over investigatory tactics, and hone in on the killer.

But Bong Joon Ho has larger aspirations than documenting police procedure. On this latest viewing, I was struck by the film’s settings, which are large, sometimes enormous. Rock quarries, rice fields, industrial factories…our detectives look so small in comparison. As time passes, their obsession with catching the killer grows to enormous proportions as well.

Bong is drawing a comparison in Memories of Murder, between the man-made concept of justice and the immutable powers of the natural world. Sure these men are chasing justice and striving to do right, but they’re also just human beings, susceptible to feelings of fear, bias, jealousy, and rage. 

Their pursuit of justice is as admirable as it is temporal and ill-defined. 

But notice the wind in Memories of Murder. Notice the natural light from the sun and the moon. Notice the rain. These are not temporal or ill-defined. These have been a part of the natural world for the billions of years before man’s emergence, before man ever conceived of the idea of justice. 

The film ends in the same rice field where the movie begins. It’s mid-day and the sun is glowing warmly and the wind is rustling the grass. 17 years earlier a pretty young woman was bound, murdered, and shoved into an irrigation pipe in that field. Now, a middle-aged Detective Park is returning to the scene for the first time in years. He crouches down to look into the pipe.

There is nothing in the pipe now, of course. Then a little girl comes walking along a path and mentions to Detective Park that another man was looking into the same pipe the other day. What man? asks Detective Park. Just an ordinary man, says the girl. 

Was it a family member? Detective Park seems to wonder. Was it one of his old police partners? Was it the killer?

What would justice look like now, all these years later? His eyes scan the horizon. Whatever answers that were out there are distant memories.