Movie review: Violent and fatherly in Memories of murder

South Korean

Bong Joon Ho made a huge international impact when he dominated the Oscars in 2019 and Parasit won best non-English language film, original script, direction and best film.

Joon Ho was already something of a rock star in the arthouse and genre world for his black humor and social criticism in films such as the post-apocalyptic Snowpiercer and the monster sandwich The Host.

Memories of Murder is an impressive complex to be a second film.

It sounds like a suicide mission to any director: to combine noir detective with father in a Korean military dictatorship?

And base it on a true event? The film is loosely based on the first serial murder case in South Korea, specifically in the Hwaseong farming community between 1986 and 1991.

We meet the

incompetent detective Park Doo-man (played by Bong Joon with favorite actor Kang-ho Song) who is thrown into the hot air after two women are found in a ditch, murdered and raped.

Park is overwhelmed by the task and falls back on his old methods: beating and torturing suspects on false grounds to force a confession.

Park claims that he has a special eye for recognizing perpetrators, but soon accuses a mentally ill man with no further motive for the act.

A new detective is called in from the capital and his professional methods clash with Park's gut-based police work.

But even the refined detective loses morale when the search for the ever-disappearing evidence becomes too tiring. 

In interviews,

has told about how he did rigorous research for the film and was himself obsessed with finding the killer's identity, something that is reflected in the desperate tone of the film.

In 2019, the police finally managed to find the killer, which led many to return to Memories of murder, and the film helped to improve the South Korean police's methods.

Looking back on this time could have been a dark experience.

That's it in part.

Joon Ho does not shy away from showing morbid details from the bodies of the murdered women.

Still, it's downright comical to see the clumsy cops fussing with each other and groping for false evidence and keeping the spotlight on more than actually solving the murders.

Bong Joon The ability to find the match between comedy and tragedy means that the emotional effort in his films always feels higher than in traditional satire.

A true artist

puts the finishing touches on the last and Joon Ho lets the memories in the title have their full meaning only in the last scene of the film.

When Detective Park shows proof of his magical gaze and the audience is forced to reflect on their own role in the mistakes of history.

Memories of Murder premieres together with the debuts Barking dogs never bite (2000) and Mother (2009).