"Memories of Murder (살인의 추억)": review

In the very last moment of the movie, former detective Park Doo-man (Song Gang-ho) wonders whether the murderer is among us.

[WARNING: major spoilers for a 23-year-old film.]

2003's "Memories of Murder" (a literal translation of the Korean title "살인의 추억/Salin-ae Chueok"), directed by Bong Joon-ho, stars Song Gang-ho, Kim Sang-gyung, Kim Roi-ha, Jeon Mi-seon, Go Seo-hee, Song Jae-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park No-shik, Ryu Tae-ho, and Park Hae-il. The story is based on a play about a real event in Korea's 1980s past: a serial killer in the Hwaseong area has been roaming the countryside, raping and killing young women. Meanwhile, the local police are at a loss for clues, so a detective from Seoul is brought in.

I should say right off the bat that I was reminded of a novel called The Shaker written by a good friend of mine. It's a mystery about a friend who goes missing. The main character, who is not a detective, puts on his Sherlock hat and clumsily tries to put together what clues he's gathered to find his friend. By the end of the novel, the friend is never found. The parallels between The Shaker and "Memories of Murder" are striking. I also noticed that, however much director Bong might be obsessed with a Marxist view of the world in recent years, this early work is devoid of that sort of social commentary (unless I missed some big clues). There is, however, other social commentary.

The premise is that local Hwaseong City detective Park Doo-man (Song Gang-ho) and his partner Cho Yong-koo (Kim Roi-ha) are called to the scene of a murder‚ one of a string of murders that all seem to have the same modus operandi. The crime scene is a godawful mess, though: nothing's been cordoned off, and a tractor has just run over a crucial shoe print found in the mud near the murder site. The press is making its usual mess of things, and as becomes obvious, our detectives aren't the brightest people, either (and neither is their boss). As with many films portraying 80s-era Korea, there's plenty of sloppiness, slovenliness, chaos, and unprofessionalism both in town and at the police station. To help move the futile investigation along, a hotshot detective from Seoul, Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-gyung), is brought in. Unlike Detective Park, who claims to discover guilt or innocence through mere eye contact, Detective Seo is up on all the latest scientific procedures and has what Park thinks is an annoyingly American way about him. Park and Seo dislike each other, and Seo disapproves of Park's sloppy, unethical methods, which include allowing his violent partner Cho to beat up and torture suspects into confessing, thus resulting in an overabundance of confessions as well as unwanted attention from the press. As the case goes on, however, Seo finds himself knowing the region better and even stoops to getting rough with his suspects as he becomes more a part of the local culture. He and Park also eventually come to respect each other as they work on the case. Some tantalizing leads also come in from young, female officer Kwon Kwi-ok (Go), who realizes that the same piece of music plays every rainy night that a murder happens. 

In this period of Korean history, with Korea barely thirty years beyond the armistice that ended the fighting in the Korean War, CSI technology is almost unheard of, thus leaving the police—even Detective Seo—utterly stymied. The history of the actual case (Google Hwaseong serial killer or Hwaseong murders) is available online for anyone to read, and this movie came out 23 years ago, so I don't mind saying that the case was eventually solved in 2019: the killer was Lee Choon-jae. Bong's movie came out in 2003, with the murders still unsolved. He deliberately had actor Song Gang-ho look directly into the camera in the film's final scene, thus breaking the fourth wall, in the hopes that the serial killer might be in the crowd of moviegoers and see this look as a personal challenge. This was apparently the right move, as the killer himself later confessed: he had indeed seen the movie and been provoked.

Watching the movie from a 2020s-era American perspective produced mixed feelings. I'm pretty sure that most of the police abuse would be grounds for massive lawsuits these days, especially an egregious incident near the end of the film involving a train tunnel, handcuffs, and a gun. Given the surveillance state we all now live in, the beatings and torture depicted in Bong's film would be nearly impossible today. I did, however, appreciate the gorgeous farmland cinematography: I've walked through farmland and small towns like the areas depicted in the movie. I also appreciated the commentary Bong was making about the treatment of women in the office, where a perfectly capable female officer spends her day getting the men coffee and only making her presence known when she takes the initiative to offer her own insights. Bong also has a good eye for the chaos-prone nature of unruly Korean culture, and his film is a not-so-subtle criticism of male arrogance and vanity, and how those vices can ruin what should be a methodical, scientific investigation.

The character arcs and conflicts were well laid out, but I suppose some arcs and events were predictable. That Park and Seo would eventually come to respect each other was a given, and I could see the death of one character—a star witness who accidentally does himself in—from a mile away. My understanding is that the movie was only loosely based on real events, so I assume that the plot was full of the usual literary contrivances.

All that said, the movie was well directed, well acted, and an epistemologist's wet dream on the order of Wittgenstein's Poker, a book I'd read years ago about an altercation between the philosophers Ludwig "language games" Wittgenstein and Karl "falsifiability" Popper. This altercation involved the two philosophers at Cambridge in a parlor with a fireplace. Wittgenstein reputedly brandished the fireplace poker threateningly at Popper, but in later accounts of the incident, details were a confusing mess as to who, exactly, did what. The BBC journalists who wrote the book, David Edmonds and John Eidinow, noted the irony of the confused eyewitness testimony since the university parlor where the incident occurred was, at the time, full of epistemologists (epistemology = the study of how we know things). The book ends with a speculative recreation of the event from the best of the journalists' ability, but nothing is resolved. "Memories of Murder" is, frustratingly, a lot like that, with dead ends at every turn, and with none of the evidence adding up to anything definitive. Until 2019, that is, well after the film's release.

As I've gotten older, I've become more tolerant of vagueness and ambiguity as I've come to appreciate the swirling complexity of human society and the world in general. I remember rudely telling my novel-writing friend, years ago, that I had come away frustrated by his work because of his refusal to resolve things in a clear manner; if I could do so now, I would apologize to him for my superficiality and offer to edit and locally publish his work, which he had only ever released as an online file (now seemingly gone). I don't think I have his novel's manuscript any longer, but I did manage to find the critique I'd written and am now ashamed of. I cringed tonight as I reread what I had written.

"Memories of Murder" evoked a lot of my own memories (but not of murders since I'm fairly certain I haven't committed any of those). It's a well-written, well-structured, well-directed, well-acted, and frustrating film that follows the most unscientific, unmethodical, and unprofessional flailing-about I've seen in a film that wasn't a comedy. Or maybe it was: a black comedy. The story certainly has moments of obvious humor. It's a movie about how people can get in their own way, with ego often triumphing over truth. It's also remarkably free of the treacly sentimentality and melodrama found in so many lesser Korean productions. If you haven't seen this movie (and it was one of the earliest Korean movies to gain some popularity in the West), I recommend it. I will say, though, that there was one line repeated by Detective Seo, the city-slicker, that I found hilariously naive: "Documents don't lie." I also have to wonder what the Hwaseong police force thought about this unflattering depiction of them.