Crime Scene is a monthly Vague Visages column about the relationship between crime cinema and movie locations. VV’s Memories of Murder essay contains spoilers. Bong Joon Ho’s 2003 film features Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-kyung and Kim Roe-ha. Check out film essays, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the home page.

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Bong Joon-ho’s second feature premiered in 2003, a time when Korean cinema was emerging as a major force. But where other film industries or movements usually fade over time as a result of political winds changing, financial instability or just a dissipation of creative energy, South Korean cinema has maintained an international visibility. It’s not that there’s anything specific in the water: the films lean commercial, the country has a functioning film infrastructure and policies made at a nationwide level help maintain the industry. 

When Bong’s Oscar and Cannes-winning Parasite (2019) kickstarted its worldwide victory lap, the director was asked to remark on the film’s ability to transcend borders. He famously said, “There is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country — it’s called capitalism.” Bong is right, but part of the success of his films boils down to his ability to zero in on Korean specificities that apply to worldwide themes, a trait he shares with his most internationally successful peers like Park Chan-wook. This trait also ensures that Bong’s Korean work remains his best, with his English-language productions like Snowpiercer (2012) and Okja (2017) lacking the same spark.

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It’s a sense of Korean specificity that defines Memories of Murder, which is still the best of Bong’s films. For all the world-conquering brilliance of Parasite, its clean, modernist lines and precision-engineered direction are just a little too airtight. The muddy, sodden and downright miserable world in which Memories of Murder takes place is grittier and more lived-in (though, of course, Parasite is all about people who live completely different lives than most people).

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Memories of Murder takes place in 1986 Hwaseong , an agricultural area about 25 miles south of the capital Seoul. In the 80s, South Korea was moving towards democratization after over two decades of military dictatorship and authoritarian rule. The Seoul Olympics of 1988 were just around the corner, and the country was beginning to grow economically. Bong, born in 1969, came of age in this tumultuous period, partaking in student demonstrations (which are partly depicted in Memories of a Murder), and so it seems natural that he wanted to return to this time period to tell a story focused on the state’s human rights abuses, bureaucratic incompetence and the misrepresentation of facts. What better way to approach these themes than via a real-life serial killer case that, at the time of release, was still unsolved?

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The rural nature of Hwaesong provides much of the thematic detail in Memories of Murder, accentuated by Bong’s eye for architecture. It’s a grotty, damp-looking film, drained of color. Bong and cinematographer Kim Hyung-ku used a bleach bypass process to create the grey/brown look. The exceptions are Memories of Murder’s prologue and epilogue, both of which shock with their bright, airy colors, seemingly shot on the only two days which had sunlight. The brightness of these scenes is set against the undercurrent of evil which they depict: at the beginning the discovery of the first body with children playing blissfully unaware nearby; the second in the same spot 15 years later, with Detective Park (Song Kang-ho) staring vacantly, unable to find answers to the questions he’s been asking for so long. The bright colors act as an obfuscation device: the serial killer may have captured the Korean imagination at the time, but once he stopped, the rest of society moved on without a thought, leaving only the families of his victims and those caught in the riptide of his crimes.

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However, Bong’s point-of-view reaches beyond the personal in Memories of Murder. Much of his interest is in how the four main policemen interact with the community around them while searching for the murderer: Park, his fight-first partner Cho (Kim Roi-ha), Seoul detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung) and their boss Shin (Song Jae-ho). Their police station office is drab and overloaded with files sprawling everywhere. The “interrogation room” is just a basement housed at the bottom of an absurdly steep flight of stairs, itself used to comic and dramatic effect to accentuate the hierarchical power imbalance between characters. Detective Cho’s preference for drop-kicking suspects is both a recurring gag, and also a visual moniker of his livewire belief in authoritarianism and violence, a view shared only a little less openly by his colleagues. That steadfast belief frequently derails the investigation, pushing the detectives down rabbit holes that have no basis in fact. The most effective detective, arguably, is Officer Kwon (Ko Sie-ho), apparently the only female officer in the building, yet she is frequently sidelined or ignored by the men around her.

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The detectives exist as products of their environment, acting as one of the most publically visible parts of a state that, at the time, was still under one-party rule. What begins as unshakeable trust in their methods gradually becomes more ambiguous. The introduction of Seoul-based Detective Seo initially brings a more scientific, cosmopolitan perspective (which his colleagues chide him for), but for all his astute reasoning, even Seo is unable to find conclusive answers, resorting to violence himself when science fails. The city boy can bring the supposed cultural advancement of urban modernity to the countryside, but Seo still exists as part of the same system, and that system — suppressing student protests (which in turn reduces manpower at a critical part in the investigation), violently forcing confessions from suspects, opportunistically looking for photo ops — is clearly disinterested in meaningful justice.

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Bong allows many of these themes to be drawn visually. In Memories of Murder’s first half, he relies on ensemble staging and long drawn-out takes. It’s rather Hawksian, with different social types forced to work together to overcome a greater challenge. Some of these scenes are deliberately showy: a chaotic crime scene riddled with clumsiness is shot in a dizzying one-taker that crawls over the whole affair; later, a drunken argument is staged in one near-static take, only slowly drifting into the main characters to gain clarity.

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But the investigation drones, attentions wander and the protagonists begin to lose faith in their ability to find a resolution. Bong cuts away from ensemble staging, applying close-ups more frequently. Viewers receive more time to search into the actor’s eyes, looking for answers, even as those eyes find nothing to respond with.

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That lack of resolution — so integral to Memories of Murder’s morbid ambiguity and critique of the state — finds visual expression in the Korean countryside. This agricultural area feels rather drab and anonymized. There’s not much in the way of landmarks, other than a restaurant the detectives frequent. This anonymization seems to prevent the officers from being able to find anything: the countryside, where difference is often frowned upon, is a place where anybody who looks out of the norm is regarded as a potential suspect — a place where the protagonists can’t see the woods for the trees. Without anything to pick up on, they slowly lose their minds. When Detective Park re-emerges in the epilogue 15 years down the line, it’s no surprise he’s become a city sales exec — normalized, urbane, cosmopolitan… but no less the wiser. The ditch he found the first body in is as silent as ever.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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