Detective Park: “Chief, I may know nothing else, but my eyes can read people. It’s how I survive as a detective. There’s a reason people say I have shaman eyes.”
Chief: “Okay, then. You see those two guys there? One of them’s a rapist, and the other is the victim’s brother. He caught the guy doing this to his sister, and dragged him in. So tell me, which one’s the rapist?”
Memories of Murder is about looking, and looking back. Its two detective protagonists are a study in contrasts in many ways, but chiefly in the way they look at the case two which they have both been assigned. Detective Seo (Sang-kyung Kim) has an eye for details; several times during the course of the investigation he will walk into a room with a suspect, examine the hands, and declare that they have not yet found their killer. Detective Park (Song Kang-ho) has an eye for people, or so he thinks. When the Chief poses him the riddle of the two men, one guilty and one innocent, Park studies them from across the room but has no answer. The movie is a journey away from his certainty that the interior of the soul can ever be accurately discerned.
Park is introduced walking across a field of tall, yellow grass to stoop down and peer into a small concrete culvert in the ground, inside of which is stuffed a dead woman, bound and crawling with insects. She stares back at him. His task is not to see her so much as the man behind this act–whoever stalked her on a rainy evening, bound her, raped her, strangled her and left her here in the dark. It is 1986. This is the first recorded set of serial killings in the nation of Korea. Memories of Murder is based on a true story, but the period setting is also crucial to the film’s tone, allowing it to view the problem of solving the case through the crushing irony and existential melancholy of hindsight. The film has no flashback structure to it, but even before the coda (which jumps ahead to present day), we seem to be judging the merits of the investigators against a doubtful future result. From the very first crime scenes, when children race through the field and a tractor runs over key evidence, it’s clear that this investigation will not go well.
Serial killer movies are common, but rarer and more interesting are those in the specific subgenre to which Memories of Murder belongs. These are procedurals, not thrillers, in which the killer is little seen and the focus is on the detectives themselves–and particularly the ways in which a lengthy investigation is for them at times a Kafkaesque absurdity, a blackly comic labyrinth of endless suspects of clues that lead down dead end alleys, and at other times a grueling, soul-killing endurance trial that undermines their belief in the attainability of truth. Citizen X belongs in this category, as does Zodiac, the 2007 David Fincher movie that likewise eventually becomes about a maddening struggle against an epistemological nightmare. All three films are based on true stories of serial killers whose unsolved cases stretched on and on despite herculean efforts.
Cases such as these are like the torment of Tantalus, where the solution seems to recede as the detectives reach for it. Certainty to them is like star systems to the Empire: the more they try and tighten their grip, the more it slips through their fingers. After decades, they wonder where all the sand went, marveling at the hole in the bottom of the hourglass. Citizen X found great poignancy in a hero who had to invent the modern detective methodology on his own, from behind the Iron Curtain and in a government which stymied his efforts at every turn. Zodiac showed how multiple protagonists picked up the case’s baton and ran with it, even as history meant an increasingly overwhelming accumulation of contradictory, irrelevant or even outright false data behind which, somewhere, hid a killer. The latter film was a masterpiece; here is another, by Bong Joon-ho, best known for the sci-fi parable Snowpiercer, the giant monster movie The Host, and most recently the Netflix-released oddity Okja. In Memories of Murder, freed from the burden of building entire computer generated worlds and characters, Bong is able to tell an absolutely controlled story that shifts effortlessly between tones and exhibits a mise-en-scène I can only describe as perfect. I treasured every shot.
Memories of Murder is a gorgeous movie, full of earth tones, industrial grays, the yellow of the fields of grass, and red, the color which on a woman inflames the killer’s need. Compositions invoke the classical Hollywood style of the pre-war era, when film had not yet forgotten the lessons of theater–how to arrange more than two people within the frame, how the choreographed movement of actors in time and space can be a complicated, expressive dance. Bong is not above the quick edits of modern movies, but he deploys them where they make sense, first in sequences that build excitement later revelations will sour, and then in scenes where the detectives confront the dead women’s bodies on the ground or on the autopsy table, offering only brief glimpses of the broken, dirty things they’ve been reduced to. It’s as if the film itself is horrified and would prefer not to look at what has been done to them. One or two editing moments are less successful–one cuts from a body to barbecuing beef, and it’s unclear whether the film intends to draw one association, that a living human has been reduced to meat, or the opposite, that the detectives gather to eat in a repudiation of the death they’ve witnessed. There’s even an honest to God Gilligan cut, when Seo tells a witness he has better things to do than investigate an outhouse before, in the very next shot–well, you get the idea.
But mostly the film’s visual language is contained within the duration of the shot, a much more elegant and less overt way to delineate conflicts, contrasts, and connections. This scene, chosen almost at random by me because the strategy is used constantly throughout the movie, is filmed so that you can see all five characters in the scene at once. Each has their own series of lines and physical movements which reveal their characters and progress the scene, all of which is carefully orchestrated so that the viewer can choose which to focus on at any given moment, but is encouraged by the specific timing and progression to follow along exactly as the scene intends. Showing them all together, rather than trying to intercut between all five characters, the resulting shot feels both naturalistic and theatrical, real and perfect at the same time.
What begins as a series of two shots, the chief and Seo discussing the case with Park and Cho, becomes a long take four shot and then a five shot:
The female officer, Kwon Kwi-ok (Seo-hie Ko), enters frame, bringing the coffee Park has requested, but also a potential new lead in the case: she’s noticed a pattern in a local radio program that may line up with the timing of the murders. Notice how the performances and blocking shift our focus within the frame, on the cinematography principles that the eye tends to look for who’s speaking, for who is facing most directly toward camera, toward bright colors or white areas, toward physical movement and things that make noise, and sweeping from left to right. The men are facing in different directions, slumped in the frame, idly fidgeting with things (a lighter, a rag), visibly as well as audibly lacking investigative momentum and not aligned together toward any possible idea or action. Officer Kwon moves in and out frame and backward and forward along the z-axis of the shot, standing up straight, delivering coffee and then returning with her report; while the other detectives mope at their desks, racking their brains to figure out the case, Kwon catches our attention visually even while the men don’t seem to notice her. (You probably didn’t notice her at first either–one of those first two shots is actually a three shot, with Kwon out of focus in the background, making coffee.)
The result is that the visual framing and staging of the scene subtly put us on Kwon’s side as she offers up her radio theory, and the camera supports her by moving to reframe:
The new composition, still in the same take, now has Kwon in the important position at the right side of the frame as the other men walk up or lean in toward the chief’s desk, where he examines her report. The radio on his desk completes the composition, highlighting the nature of the new clue, and as Kwan details her theory, she finally gets the men’s full attention:
This kind of filmmaking is so careful and controlled, and yet so elegant and satisfying to watch; it’s no wonder that Bong uses this strategy again and again in the film, each time to great effect. One long take demonstrates the chaos of moving parts at a disorganized crime scene, many of those parts moving in the wrong direction. Another, set during a night out for food and booze and explicated beautifully by this video essay from the series Every Frame a Painting, demonstrates the disparity in personalities and philosophies between the detectives much more effectively than a conventional, television-style over the shoulder/reverse shot conversation would have done:
Other shots are appealing not only aesthetically but because of the sly way they reveal or conceal information. One short scene, for instance, shows a woman hanging laundry on a line. Just as she finishes, she feels a drop of rain, and quickly starts to take it all down again, to the rhythm of the pop song leading us into the next sequence. The point of the laundry scene is that rain is coming, and with it the potential for another murder. Another film might have used a television weather report and a heavy musical sting, but Memories of Murder‘s method is so much more elegant, giving us the information but also a brief sketch, as if to remind us what happens to best laid plans right before we observe an attempt by the detectives to set a trap for the killer.
Another thematic motif in the film is how often the characters are seen eating and drinking, and not just Officer Kwon’s coffee. Bong has always been interested in the emotive qualities of food; in The Host, the simple noodles that the family share in their tiny home symbolizes a kind of joining together of familial and national identity in times of crisis, and nowhere in Snowpiercer is the class divide more painfully illustrated than in the contrast between the noxious protein sludge the downtrodden poors at the back of the train are forced to subsist on (it’s even worse once they find out what’s in it) and the fact that the wealthy front train elitists get to celebrate each year with a meal of fresh sushi. Memories of Murder touches on both themes–the long-suffering detectives and their chief bond over food and drink, and one scene quietly notes the picky eating habits of city-slicker Seo, who is perhaps used to better service in Seoul than here in the backwater.
But food tends to serve in the film not just as a comfort but as a purposeful distraction, an excuse not to focus one’s full energies on the case. We are used to the trope of the TV detective who is relentlessly dedicated in their pursuit of the killer, and Koreans, steeped in their tradition of intense police thrillers like I Saw the Devil and A Hard Day, are no stranger to the notion of the brilliant, handsome cop who will do anything to get his man. Detective Park seems exactly the opposite. It’s not that he doesn’t care–you can tell that Park really does want to solve the case–and he’s not a total incompetent, either. (In fact, Park demonstrates throughout that he is a skillful interrogator, despite the issues with his overall case strategies.) It’s more that, despite his bluster, Park may already sense on some level that he is not up to the task. His best efforts at solo investigation are laughable–at one point, while Detective Seo is out chasing down leads, Park is spending his time in bathhouses, awkwardly scoping out men in an attempt to find someone with no pubic hair (as none have been found at the scenes. “Baldies,” he proclaims to the chief, who is dubious about this line of investigation; Park’s partner helpfully points out the nearby Buddhist temple). The most consistent way the film shades in Park’s inadequacies is how often he’s eating instead of working–at his desk, in cafes and bars. It’s as if he and his fellow local cops are already shrugging pessimistically about their chances. Sure, they may not solve the case today, but no use in going hungry.
Included in the film’s many pleasures, however, is that you never can tell which details in a scene are inconsequential, there to provide verisimilitude, the messiness of life intruding on the plot, and which details may prove crucial to the case. One of the restaurants where the detectives go for dinner literally hides one suspect in its walls. In another instance, a chance meeting with a pair of school children leads to Seo investigating a rumor and turning up what could be another victim–this one alive, although she never saw her rapist’s face. The problem with the case, indeed, is not really a lack of evidence or avenues to explore, but the difficulties in pinning down whether their data is clear evidence of guilt or mere coincidence. Is the killer the young man who always requests a certain love song on each day that a murder takes place? Or do he and the real killer simply both enjoy a certain mood on rainy nights?
Of the three principle suspects the detectives interrogate, the song requester seems the most promising, particularly to Detective Seo. Unlike Seo, however, Detective Park has been prepared for this event by his humbling in two previous instances–first, with a scarred and mentally disabled kid named Baek Kwang-ho (No-shik Park), whom Park and his partner Detective Cho (Roe-ha Kim) try to beat and manipulate into confessing, and then with a man caught masturbating at the place where one of the bodies was found, whom Park and Cho detain and torture for days until he’ll say anything just to be let out. Personal and professional humiliation and guilt dog Park through each of these failures. The disabled kid, soft-spoken and pathetically shy, is like a whipped cur; after Cho plays Bad Cop with his boot, Park coaches Baek through a false confession and then takes him to re-enact the murder, an event which falls apart in full view of a gaggle of reporters, leading to political fallout and a reshuffling of the departmental administration. Later the detectives visit Kwang-ho’s family’s restaurant (“I only beat you up because I care about you,” says Cho, unconvincingly) and the guilty Park, who tried to trick the kid by using the Baek’s shoes to manufacture false footprint evidence, attempts to assuage his conscience by gifting him a new pair of Nike’s. (“These are Nice, not Nike,” points out the eagle-eyed Detective Seo. “N-I-C-E. If you buy him sneakers, you should get the real thing.”) Things go from bad to worse after the detectives realize that Baek is actually a witness, not a suspect, and once they find him again it becomes clear that Park’s behavior towards the kid has permanently damaged his ability to help the case. Traumatized by his experience at the hands of the police, Baek simply doesn’t trust them anymore, and when pressed to recall the killer’s appearance, he starts remembering the man who burned him long ago, flees the conversation, and ends up getting run over by a train. In an equally complicated series of events, Park’s partner Cho’s complicity in the beatings of suspects lead to him losing a leg as the result of a bar fight injury. The pressures of the case, and particularly the way in which it resists both Park and Cho’s brutal, bullshit small town tactics, bear down on the detectives until their emotions explode out of them in dangerous and counterproductive ways.
Even Seo is not immune. One of the subtler aspects of Memories of Murder is the way that, although it establishes Seo as a shining example of the handsome, relentless archetype in order to critique the ineffectual Detective Park, the film then goes on to demonstrate the limits and downsides of the Seo type as well. Park’s shoddy, disorganized crime scenes are laughable, but even when Seo uses a bullhorn to take full control of the next set of forensic opportunities, he has to admit that the killer has been “flawless” in leaving essentially no usable evidence. Unlike Park, Seo is rarely seen eating and, befitting a man visiting the countryside specifically for this case, seems to have no life here outside of work. In contrast, Park has several scenes at home with a girlfriend, which are crucial to giving him the possibility of quitting his difficult and depressing career (inspiring the film’s coda), as well as in setting up a scene late in the film of pure tension and horror, when the killer, hiding in the woods, looks back and forth along a path, choosing whether he will attack Park’s girlfriend or the schoolgirl that Seo has befriended, both of whom happen to be out alone tonight.
That scene, which reminded me of the one in Zodiac where Jake Gyllenhaal’s amateur investigation leads him to an unnerving encounter with a potential suspect in a dark and creepy basement, is more than just a simple exercise in tension. It demonstrates how the anonymous serial killer of women perverts the very act of looking which the detectives on his trail try so hard to fulfill. For him, visual cues like the rain, like the red clothing, are the special elements of the image he seeks to find, just as he imposes his own image on his victims: binding them, gagging them, using their own clothing to strangle them, and leaving them in the wilderness to be found later. Likewise, the detectives build up their own image of the killer which they seek to find: soft hands, a certain kind of shoe, a lack of hair, and always, always the face, which is never seen or described in detail. The search goes on, maddening, destabilizing, causing sleeplessness and frustration–and terror, on rainy nights.
As the case progresses, Detective Seo–calmer, more observant, and more educated than Park (he went to a four year school, while Park and Cho went to two year program)–is increasingly less confident in his ability to find the killer. Initially contemptuous of Park’s violent and ultimately useless methods, Seo finds his cool intellect punctured by emotion until guilt and human failure drive him to recklessness. Although he uses logic and smart detective work to find additional evidence that enables him to dismiss Park’s zealous pursuit of the wrong suspects (the disabled Baek Kwang-ho doesn’t have the finger strength to tie the victims limbs with such tight knots, Seo decides, and the masturbator doesn’t have the smooth, uncalloused hands the living rape victim describes of her assailant), eventually even Seo is faced with the narrow, infinite gulf between the suspect who seems guilty and the lack of evidence that would prove it once and for all.
The final confrontation between Park, Seo, and the song requester, Park Hyun-gyu (no relation, and played with chilling ambiguity by Hae-il Park), draws all of these themes and frustrations together into a scene of gripping drama. Hyun-gyu has been under 24-hour surveillance for days or weeks while the detectives wait for DNA comparison results to be sent from the United States. (As in Citizen X, the American FBI was more advanced in investigative forensics and behavioral science than most countries at the time.) With Park distracted and depressed by the rapidly declining fortunes of his partner Cho, Detective Seo struggles to maintain the surveillance by himself. Nodding off on the job one night, Seo awakens to find that Hyun-gyu is boarding a bus and that Seo’s car won’t start, a lovely payoff to a seemingly random detail in an earlier scene that had the detectives struggling to push the broken-down vehicle up a hill–that image itself a wonderfully understated metaphor for the whole case, if there ever was one. After Hyun-gyu slips his tail, Seo discovers that that night the killer struck again, this time killing the school girl Seo had met during the investigation. Seo’s guilt and rage makes him sure that Hyun-gyu is the killer: psychologically Seo has connected his two failures, to maintain his watch and to prevent another murder, into a certainty that they are directly related. Even the American DNA report, which specifically says that the science cannot conclusively say that the killer’s semen and Hyun-gyu’s sample are a match, fails to dissuade him. Seo at last resorts to Park’s methods: he beats Hyun-gyu, points a gun at his head and demands a confession. “Yeah, I killed them. I killed them all,” says Hyun-gyu. “That’s what you want to hear, right?” Somehow it’s appropriate that Park, not being able to read English, can’t tell what the report says. What he does know, what he’s learned over the course of the case, is that even when you look another man in the eyes, you still can’t be sure who he really is. “Fuck, I don’t know,” he admits, staring directly into Hyun-gyu’s eyes. “Do you get up each morning, too?” He lets Hyun-gyu go, and the potential killer disappears into the darkness of the train tunnel, neither killed nor captured, looking back at the two harrowed men over his shoulder as he goes.
The vast, cavernous darkness into which the case’s last suspect disappears is like the opposite end of the cramped, dark culvert where Detective Park finds the first woman looking back at him. The case that spans between them has grown impossibly complex and unknowable in the interval. There are too many possibilities, even in this small rural province, and both detectives have seen their conviction shaken in the attempt. Americans have so much land that they have to use their brain to investigate crimes, Park says at one point. But Korea is so much smaller that, “so it’s said, Korean detectives investigate with their feet. That’s folk wisdom, you bastard.” But both Park’s folk wisdom and Seo’s big city smarts fail to produce a definitive result.
Memories of Murder has the hallmark of all great movies: every part seems in some way to contain the whole. It’s there in the first shot, when a child in a field carefully observes, then catches a bug. It’s there in the way the two detectives spar verbally and physically over a table full of drinks, with the chief in the background focusing on new investigative strategies even as he’s vomiting into a bucket. It’s there in the subtle moments of commentary on sexism, as when Officer Kwon is objectified (the other cops chuckle when she has to wear a red dress and act as bait for the killer on rainy nights) and handed empty coffee cups to clean, even after she brings them the break in the case. It’s there perhaps most notably in the scene where Park, Cho and Seo chase the masturbator from a body dump site to the nearby factory where all the workers wear the same uniform and the same white mask.
Like much of the film, the chase scene is both tense and somehow funny, an engaging blend of action with a kind of Three Stooges farce (it begins in screwball fashion, as both Seo and Park and Cho separately decide to stake out the dump site, each mistaking the other for the killer returning to the scene of the crime). Park, who earlier tried to defend his self-proclaimed detective’s instinct by turning to a shaman for advice, now claims he just knows which worker is the man they chased, although in reality he’s seen that this man is wearing the same red panties as the masturbator. The way this sequence–funny, tense, even triumphant–ultimately leads them down another depressing rabbit hole is emblematic of the whole narrative. The red underwear and the man’s admitted sexual interest in the newspaper reports of the murders suggest him as the aberrant individual the investigation should focus on, just as in their own way so do Baek Kwang-ho’s disabilities and Park Hyun-gyu’s unusual taste in music. But, Park notes of the masturbator, “according to neighbors, he looks diligently after his sick wife, never misses a week at church,” is an honest man. “All perverts are like that,” says Park. The darkest, saddest secret that the film has is that the killer may be impossible to find because he is so ordinary, so like everybody else in their community. If looking can’t show you who a man is inside, what’s the point of looking?
Park seems to have come to the same conclusion. The film’s coda, taking place decades years later, finds that he’s left the police force entirely, married his girlfriend, fathered two children who are now teenagers. Although now he makes his living selling appliances, he still kids himself that he can look into someone’s eyes and tell the truth of them. “You played computer games all night, right?” he asks his son. “Look in my eyes, son.” The boy insists he didn’t. Later Park finds himself passing by the yellow field where he found that first victim, so long ago, and stops to see. The heart of the film’s odd mix of horror, failure, and subtle nostalgia presents itself here, in the tall grass. The little culvert is still there, and Park once again stoops down to look inside. Nothing. A little girl passing by tells him someone else did the same thing recently. Tells him the other man “remembered doing something here long ago, so he came back to take a look.” Park hasn’t been a detective for a long time, but he can’t help but ask the question: “Did you see his face?” All his hopes, and ours, and the weight of years and guilt and failure hang waiting for the answer. But all the little girl can say is that the man looked kind of plain. “Just… ordinary.”
It’s a strange thing, to give years of your life to the search for a murderer. Stranger still to have failed in the attempt. That both Park and the ordinary-looking killer can feel some kind of emotional pull back to that time and those deaths proves, most disturbingly of all, that both of them must simply be… human. The impulses of sexism and violence that drove the killer are not different in kind from those qualities in Park; they’re only different in degree. On some level, like all people, the two of them are alike. Once you’ve looked too long at that fact, it becomes impossible to unsee.
Every year, Kyu attempts to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days. This year, it’s Killtoberfest 666, because you can never know the devil for sure. Check out past Killtoberfests along with this year’s reviews, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @insidethekraken to track Kyu’s progress.