Sunlight, for the rest of the film, will give way to overcast skies and dark nights until its final scene. She is glimpsed in pained, fragmentary close-ups, eyes open with skin like spoiled leather, as leaves and hungry insects shrink from Park’s uncovering. Curious children frolic and tease harried grownups amid rustling sunlit waves of stalks and mud––while unbeknownst to them, Detective Park locates a grey, rotting young corpse in a roadside gutter. A sprawling, green-and-golden grain field (soon to be one of the film’s main locations) is presented in stunning, color-rich compositions by DP Kim Hyung-koo, accompanied by Taro Iwashiro’s somber, bittersweet score on strings and piano. Loosely based on the real-life serial murder case that shook South Korea during the late 1980s, the film follows a task force of baffled detectives, led by schlubby everyman Park Doo-man (longtime Bong collaborator and Korean New Wave mainstay Song Kang-ho), as the bound and violated corpses of young women begin turning up around the sleepy rural city of Hwaesong.Ī stately, elegiac tone distinguishes the film from the average crime thriller right from the opening scene. (Its most obvious point of comparison is David Fincher’s Zodiac, though to properly compare and contrast the two would require a lengthy essay of its own.) Imbued with the mercurial, melancholic tones and indignant social consciousness of the Korean New Wave superstar’s finest work, Bong’s 2003 masterpiece remains a haunting chronicle of impotence, frustration, systemic dysfunction, and unfathomable injustice wrapped up in a rain-slick neo-noir coat. Of course, this isn’t the only way in which Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder distances itself from the Hollywood standard-not even close. In the procedural genre, where “bad cops” frequently reveal themselves to be law-enforcement geniuses, it remains shockingly refreshing to see a film where the bad cops are, in fact, bad cops.
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