Memories of Murder

Bong Joon Ho’s film follows provincial policemen working a series of murders, and its refusal to name the killer is a change of subject, not a gap. Bong says Alan Moore pushed him to think less about the killer and more about the spirit of the times that produced the murders: the social and political situation was as much to blame as any individual. The skeleton comes from Kim Kwang-lim’s 1996 play Come to See Me: three prime suspects in succession, the way the murders are linked, the song on a radio request show. The rest rests on case reports and interviews with a detective who worked the case; Bong has described one former officer breaking down in tears several times. It was not shot where the crimes happened: exteriors at Jangseong in South Jeolla, the reed field at Haenam, the tunnels at Jukbong in Jinju. In Korea 5,101,645 people saw it, the most watched release there in 2003. The case’s perpetrator was identified only in 2019, sixteen years later. A good fit if you care less about who did it than about why anyone believed a beating in that room would produce an answer. Not for anyone reading the three suspects as a chain of accumulating clues: after each one the film returns to zero.