Five years after Parasite fever swept across the globe—culminating in Bong Joon Ho and company winning the Oscar for Best Picture, the first and only non-English-language film do so—Bong is back in theaters with his carte blanche followup, the rangy sci-fi satire Mickey 17. So what better time to jump back and revisit his first masterpiece, the highly influential crime procedural Memories of Murder?
In his breakthrough second feature, Bong explodes the conventions of the policier with thrillingly subversive, genre-defying results. Based on the true story of a string of serial killings that rocked a rural community in the 1980s, Memories of Murder stars New Korean Cinema icon Song Kang Ho as the local officer who reluctantly joins forces with a seasoned Seoul detective (Kim Sang Kyung) to investigate the crimes. What starts as a gripping mystery unravels into a wrenching, years-long odyssey of failure and frustration for both men, driving them to the existential edge.
Bong’s brilliant skill for social critique comes through here early as he uses the building blocks of a procedural to expose the everyday absurdity of life under military rule. But as biting as the film is, Bong is just as attuned to the emotional fallout and the lasting ripple effects these enigmatic acts of violence have on a community.