Memories of Murder is a detective film about not solving it

Before Parasite, Bong Joon-ho made this — a procedural about two detectives investigating a series of killings in 1980s rural South Korea, working with no forensic capability and enormous political pressure.

The tonal move

It opens close to comedy. The detectives are incompetent in ways that are genuinely funny: a crime scene trampled by a tractor, an interrogation technique consisting mostly of kicking.

Then the film stops being funny, and it does it so gradually that most viewers cannot name the scene where it changed. By the last half hour the comedy has been fully withdrawn and what is left is unbearable.

What it is really about

Institutional failure under an authoritarian government. The detectives cannot solve the case partly because they are bad at it and largely because the state has no interest in giving them the resources — the army is busy, the labs do not exist, and confessions are easier to manufacture than evidence.

The ending

It is based on a real unsolved case, and the film does not invent a solution. That is the point and it frustrates viewers who came for a resolution. The final shot is one of the most discussed in Korean cinema and it turns the whole thing back onto the audience.

Watch it if

You can take a mystery that refuses to close. Subtitled, two hours, and it will stay with you longer than most films that do give you an answer.