![]() ![]() ![]() On the one hand, they’re our ‘good guys’ - men driven to seek justice in the names of the women this man has killed. Student protests are quashed by the very police forces we’re following, and Bong makes no bones about their moral ambiguity. Here, it’s South Korea in the ’80s, a country on the verge of becoming a major industrialized nation, whose rural frontiers had yet to catch up with the ‘civilizing’ forces of Seoul. Much like David Fincher’s Zodiac (though distinct in innumerable ways), Memories of Murder uses the police procedural as a way to snapshot a culture at a certain time and place. There’s Park Doo-man (Bong stalwart Song Kang-ho), the head detective who’s convinced he can suss out the truth by looking in a man’s eyes Cho Yong-koo (Kim Roi-ha), a blustering Dirty Harry-type much more likely to beat suspects than to negotiate with them and Seo Tae Yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), a young but smart big-city detective from Seoul who has more hands-off methods to investigate the murders. Loosely based on South Korea’s first big serial-killer case in the late ’80s, Bong’s film flits between three detectives as they try to track down a murderer of young girls in a sleepy farm town called Hwaesong. While discussions about police misconduct and their utility as an institution have been raging the last couple of years, Bong recognized their systemic flaws as early as Memories of Murder. And thanks to a 4K restoration that’s been distributed by NEON and now comes to the Criterion Collection, Western audiences have another opportunity to revisit this burgeoning classic. While he made his early furtive steps towards worldwide notoriety with the stellar 2005 monster picture The Host, his second feature, 2003’s Memories of Murder, showcases his intriguing command of tone and deep fascination with moral gray areas. Long before he set the world on fire with Parasite, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho was carving out a powerful presence as one of the country’s great cinematic masters. ![]()
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