Memories of Murder (2003): Bong Joon Ho's Detective Story Ends by Staring Straight at the Real Killer

A boy crouches in a field of gold rice, a grasshopper trapped in a jar behind his back. A tractor rattles past, carrying a heavyset country detective who musses the kid's hair, kneels at a covered drainage ditch and tilts a scrap of mirror to throw sunlight into the dark. A woman's body is in there. When the detective scolds some children for playing with evidence, the boy parrots him word for word, mimicking his every move: "That's important, don't touch!"

That's how Bong Joon Ho opens Memories of Murder, his 2003 film about the hunt for South Korea's first known serial killer, and it holds the key to everything after it. This is a detective movie about looking: cops stare at faces, at mug shots, into ditches, and never once see. Then, in the final shot, a detective finally looks at the right person, and that person is sitting in your seat. Bong aimed that stare at a killer who had never been caught. In 2019 the man was finally identified, and it turned out he had seen the film.

Why It's a Masterpiece

It's 1986, farm country south of Seoul. Detective Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) believes he can spot a killer by the face alone. "My eyes can read people," he brags, and the joke Bong keeps telling is that his gut is almost always wrong. His partner Jo (Kim Roe-ha) pulls a cloth cover over one boot before he stomps on suspects. Then Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung) arrives from Seoul talking about method, and the three of them chase a man who leaves women bound and gagged in the fields on rainy nights.

At the first crime scene, the chief slides down an embankment, kids run loose and a tractor rolls over a footprint. You laugh, then the camera finds the body again and the laugh dies in your throat. For two hours the comedy never cheapens the horror. It sharpens it.

The suspects come in three waves: a disabled young man beaten into a garbled confession, a man caught lurking at a crime scene, and a soft-spoken factory worker (Park Hae-il) who requests the same song on a radio show on every murder night. As the case collapses, the leads trade places. Seo, the city rationalist, turns into a wild-eyed avenger, while Park, the brawler, starts arguing for proof. Critic Tony Rayns, writing in Sight and Sound, nailed it: this is a film in which "everyone looks, sees and fails to interpret correctly."

It was no art-house curio, either: Rayns reported it was South Korea's box-office champion of 2003, and Bong won Best Director at San Sebastián.

Behind the Scenes

Bong buried himself in the real Hwaseong case, interviewing journalists, townspeople and detectives. The person who moved him most, he told Rayns, was a former cop who broke down in tears several times as they talked. That put Bong in a bind, because he had fought police in the streets as a student and never liked them. What changed his mind, he said, was "the purity of his desire to catch the criminal." You can feel that ex-cop in Song's performance: a petty, brutal man who wants the answer so badly it hurts.

The truth was weirder than anything he filmed. A shaman advised the investigators to strip naked at the seashore and bow to a bowl of sacred water. The police chief really did it, Bong said, and the naked men were mistaken for North Korean spies and had to run for it. Bong cut the scene. He preferred close-ups of his actors' faces, and as he has put it, the film had become a "road movie for faces." He'd written Park for Song from the start, because Song had "a face like people from that era."

According to Criterion producer Curtis Tsui, Bong skipped rehearsals to keep the awkwardness real, so Park's first meeting with Seo, a flying kick that sends him rolling down a hill, was the actors' first scene together. The kick wasn't planned, and it was full contact. On the 2003 commentary track, Kim Sang-kyung exclaims that he got beaten up by "the Foul King," a nod to Song's star-making 2000 comedy. As Seo unravels, Kim cut back on food and sleep so he'd look the part. Exteriors waited for clouds; when the sun came out, the crew played soccer.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• The grasshopper. In the opening, when Park first shines his mirror into the ditch, look at the victim's leg. As critic Ed Park points out in his Criterion essay, a grasshopper is clinging to it, echoing the one in the boy's jar.
• The only bright color is red. Bong stripped most primary colors out of the costumes and sets, except for red, like the clothes worn by the early victims. Most of the film was printed with a "bleach bypass" process that drains the color. Only the opening and closing scenes in the rice fields got normal processing, which is why they glow gold.
• Fake Nikes. Park gives the disabled suspect a pair of sneakers. Seo points out they're knockoffs: they say "Nice."
• The newspapers are handmade. 1986 fonts no longer existed, so the art department designed them by hand, character by character.
• The killer has no single body. Several actors with similar builds, including Park Hae-il, played the killer whenever we see only his hands, so we never get one clear set of traits.
• The names repeat. Two suspects share their surnames, Jo and Park, with two of the detectives hunting them. Not an accident.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: This section describes the final scene and what happened to the real case.

The movie jumps to 2003. Park has left the force for a sales job, a wife, two kids and an apartment. Passing the first crime scene, he stops and peers into the same ditch. A little girl tells him another man looked in there recently, saying he'd done something there long ago. What did he look like? Ordinary, she says. Just an ordinary face.

Park, the man who swore he could read faces, turns and stares straight down the lens. Song holds it, and the rice glows gold behind him. Bong has explained the shot, in remarks quoted by IndieWire: he and his actors assumed the killer would come to see the film, so they shot the failed detective looking into the camera "so that he's looking out at the audience and at the killer in the theater." At a 10th-anniversary event, Korea's Money Today reported, Bong said he had pegged the killer as a show-off who craved media attention.

Then came 2019. Police announced on September 18 that DNA had linked Lee Choon-jae, already in prison for murdering his sister-in-law in 1994, to the killings, and he went on to confess. At Beyond Fest in Los Angeles that month, Bong said he'd just seen the killer's face for the first time and needed time to explain how it felt. Lee, it turned out, had seen the movie in prison. As Ed Park recounts, Lee told reporters, "I felt nothing while watching it."

So the stare landed on a man with nothing behind his eyes. Somehow that makes it worse. Park is still looking.

Another Way to See It

Bong once said he didn't know himself whether the third suspect is the killer, and that the more he researched, the more he felt "the general social-political situation of that time was as much to blame as any individual." Rayns had handed him a copy of Alan Moore's Jack the Ripper graphic novel From Hell, and Bong said it taught him to look at "the spirit of the times" rather than the murderer.

Watch it that way and the background moves forward. This is South Korea under military ruler Chun Doo-hwan, and Bong slips in a scene of riot police crushing a student protest, the same force that's supposed to be catching the killer. As IndieWire's David Ehrlich notes, the national police spent most of its manpower suppressing the student movement, not hunting a murderer. The cops can't even read their own evidence: a semen sample has to be mailed to America for DNA testing. Ed Park calls it emblematic of "a country unable, literally, to analyze itself." The culprit, read this way, is a whole system that tortures the weak and can't find the man walking past it in the rain.

That's what makes the film ache instead of just chill. It knows failure doesn't end when a case goes cold. It moves in. Park built a whole new life, with kids and a sales job, and one sentence from a little girl at a roadside ditch knocks all of it loose. Anyone who has carried an unanswered question for years will recognize that look on Song's face: not fear, exactly, but the feeling of an old wound opening on schedule.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, if you love true crime, if Zodiac left you hollow in the best way, or if Parasite made you curious about where Bong's gift for laughing-then-freezing began. Be warned: the violence against women is grim, and the beating of the disabled suspect is hard to sit through.

Watch it subtitled, with the lights off, so the final shot gets you full in the face. Criterion released a Blu-ray in 2021 with the commentary mentioned above, and the film is sold digitally in the U.S. Then go back to the opening: look at the boy's jar, and the grasshopper on the leg, and the gold that only appears in the first and last scenes. For another movie where the men sent to keep order are the scariest thing in the frame, read our review of One Battle After Another.