The Best Films of the Zeroes: 3

3. MEMORIES OF MURDER. (2003)
Directed by Bong Joon-Ho

I’m not sure if there’s another director whose next film I’m so eagerly anticipating as Bong Joon-Ho. His four films so far have demonstrated a breathtaking range of talent. MEMORIES OF MURDER was the first film of his to make an impression on a Western audience, his debut BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE has only been shown in festivals in the UK. I’ve already written about THE HOST, while his next film MOTHER should be released later in the year. As good as both of those films are, and BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE is a terrific debut too, though a tick beneath his later work, MEMORIES OF MURDER is, indisputably, his masterpiece.

The film is about a murder investigation, which soon becomes a hunt for South Korea’s first ever serial killer, the film is based on a real crime spree, although it’s more of a character study than a slavish recreation of the facts of the case. Set in the mid-1980s, it’s quite shocking to see a crime film paint the police in such unflattering colours. The investigation gets off to several false starts, wasting time in which you get the sense that the killer could have been identified on wild goose chases and convenient scapegoats. Bong doesn’t regurgitate the tropes of what has become a tired genre, particularly in Hollywood, when you can pretty much make a serial killer movie with the same amount of attention to detail that it takes to colour-by-numbers.

For example, none of the detectives fit into the ‘maverick’ stereotype. Our lead investigator is Park, played by Bong’s regular leading man Song Kang-Ho. He and his partner Cho (Kim Rwe-Ha) frequently beat suspects, brutally forcing their prisoners into confessions. These two country cops are joined in the investigation by Detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung), who helps them to piece the murders together, giving them their best opportunity to crack the case. Of course, there are plenty of disagreements between Park and Seo, who clash constantly, but the film doesn’t use anything other than the expediency of their situation to thaw out their relationship – neither has an epiphany moment, but their shared desire to stop the murders lead to the seemingly very well-defined lines between them becoming blurred.

Bong pulls no punches in his excoriation of the Korean police. When arriving at the scene of the film’s second murder, Park is greeted by children running past the murder site. He’s then witness to two detectives falling into the crime scene. It’s the sort of scene that you imagine would detract from the film, but in Bong’s hands, it does anything but. This is an angry film, as indeed, it should be. By seeming to sideline the victims and their families he leaves their memories intact – their memories won’t be impinged by their association with these murders at the director’s hands, instead his anger is at the ineffectualness of the investigation and the tools the detectives have at their disposal; they have to send DNA samples to the USA for analysis, for example, which takes all of the momentum out of the investigation.

Both Song and Kim give wonderful performances, inhabiting their characters completely, to the extent that you forget that you’re watching somebody playing a part, but they’re allowed to flourish by Bong’s stylistic decisions, which are flawless. The film is packed with mordant black humour, a kind of macabre coping mechanism that you can imagine having to employ if you were investigating such terrible crimes. In fact, the neatest trick in the performances is that they manage to survive their scabrous unveiling as being so drastically unfit for purpose, and end the film as sympathetic victims on a similar scale to the murdered girls whom they haven’t been able to find justice for. The weight of their failure to catch the killer is tangible, and explicitly shown in the film’s heartbreaking final scenes.

Amongst the film’s best scenes is a thrilling chase scene where the detectives are certain that they’ve come across the perpetrator, following observing a man committing an act of onanism in a secluded wood. An intensely physical sequence, it’s a stunningly action-centric scene in the middle of a film otherwise dominated by dialogue. Bong later utilised his skill with a set piece to terrific effect in THE HOST. There’s also a tremendous bar-fight late on, which begins humorously, and ends with a moment of gut-wrenching heartbreak.

Bong also makes great use of the rural Korean countryside, which looks so peaceful by day, but becomes terrifyingly isolated and forbidding by night. As his move into the bigger-budget world of THE HOST would attest to, he is incredibly comfortable with the film’s set pieces, occasionally ratcheting up the tension to near-unbearable levels, a tension increased by the fact that we don’t know if they’re pursuing the right suspect. The lack of predictability in the film comes from Bong’s decision to eschew the genre conventions, the biggest of which is the aforementioned lightness of tone. It’s remarkable for such an inexperienced director to so masterfully control such changes in the tone of such an emotionally charged film. The film floats between comedy and grisly horror in the same scenes.

In the early scenes, we see Cho use a slipper over the top of his shoe in order to not leave a mark on the faces of the suspects he routinely beats during interrogations. Over the rest of the film, this becomes comedic shorthand. As soon as we see Cho reach for this slipper, it’s a moment of levity in the midst of some particularly hard-going. Yet in one scene towards the end, its impact has changed completely, and is a sign of something else, something completely and utterly depressing. The film’s effect is phenomenal. It’s a thrilling black comedy, a hilarious drama and an incredibly downbeat and devastating thriller. That’s no mean trick, and it should come as little surprise to anyone that he’s gone on to straddle several genres with his next two movies, and do so with great grace and style.