Dark—with a black wit to match—this serial-killer thriller from director Bong Joon-Ho functions clinically as a genre exercise, while also holding persuasive power as a stark meditation on police corruption. Song Kang-ho, who would go on to star in later Bong films such as The Host and Parasite, plays Det. Park Doo-man, a rural investigator who finds himself in over his head when a number of women in the area are raped and murdered over the course of several months. Park’s usual methods—intimidation, casual violence, torture—fail to yield results as he works his way through a series of suspects, necessitating the arrival of an investigator from Seoul (Kim Sang-kyung). Who will be more swayed? Park, by the new man’s moral and procedural sophistication? Or the investigator, by Park’s crude instincts? (He claims he can identify a crook by looking him in the eyes.) The answer might rest in the killer’s hands. Throughout Memories of Murder, Bong’s camera lends the countryside a sense of menace, with figures often standing alone against vast rice paddies, where threats and secrets lie hidden in the endless reeds. Song, meanwhile, has some of the playfulness that would surface more in his later collaborations with Bong, but also a surprising brutality. He’s a brute force up against evil intellect.
(7/13/2023)
