a5c7b9f00b 1986. In a rural district of South Korea, two women have been recently raped and murdered. Working on the case are detectives Park Doo-man and Cho Yong-koo. Their efforts are impeded by some sloppy crime scene procedure by the police. Their methods of solving cases are also quite basic, essentially amounting to beating confessions out of suspects. All this leads to nothing and the police chief brings in a more sophisticated and intelligent detective from Seoul, Seo Tae-yoon. With his arrival the methods improve but they still don't have the killer. Then another woman is found murdered and a pattern emerges.
South Korea in 1986 under the military dictatorship: Two rural cops and a special detective from the capital investigate a series of brutal rape murder. Their crude measures become more desperate with each new corpse found. Based on a true case.
This is a Korean movie whose reputation preceded it before I sought it out. I had already seen two Bong Joon-ho movies ("The Host" and "Barking Dogs Never Bite") so in my readings, I had learned that his masterpiece is actually this "Memories of Murder." "Memories..." is about a small very rural town which was terrorized by a serial killer who victimized young women on rainy days in the 1980s South Korea.<br/><br/>The local police detective of that town (played by Song Kang-ho, whom I saw before in "The Host" and "The Show Must Go On") employed very backward simplistic reasoning in his investigation and violent interrogation techniques on his hapless suspects. The case also attracts a detective from Seoul (played by Kim Sang-kyung) who offers his help in the investigation.<br/><br/>But since their logic and approach are polar opposites, the two detectives are constantly at odds with each other. The local detective would especially want to one-up his big city counterpart. This conflict became the source of hilarious black comedy, as well as very effectively tense dramatic moments. I felt this flawed cooperation between these two characters is the heart of the movie, while the serial killer mystery was merely a backdrop.<br/><br/>My description here of the film is very broad. There are many gems of character development scattered throughout the film that are very noteworthy as well. The director very frankly captured the atmosphere of the time, with those creepy scenes while the women were stalked, the feeling of sheer helplessness by the police as a whole, as well as how the case affected each cop personally. The ending is quite abrupt and unexpected, but I read afterward that that was how it actually happened in real life (yes, this movie was inspired by a real case!).<br/><br/>This is a highly recommended movie in my opinion. Warning on some gory scenes of corpses for those who are queasy. I definitely would like to watch more Korean movies after this one.
Beginning of this movie and the ending are highlights. in the beginning, the child's innocence and the ruthless of the murder contrast and shock.the scenario is warm, with the sun shining, contrast to the cold scene later. then a woman was found killed, the other two women who were killed in the same way were found.Thanks to the foreign senior police, no one was blamed mistakenly by the local polices, one was utilitarian, the other one is violent and ignorant.There is not much description of the procedure of solution to the case, but the movie did highlight the hero , including his wisdom, his upright, his insistent, his kind and his responsibility. The movie also showed the irresponsibility of some policies that just want to close the case and play in dirty to condemn innocent people.Women were killed one by one, while there was still these policies to deal with this case, with no other policies responding to the request of support or may due to the limitation of the number of the policies. In the final scene, the hero's anger reflect people's anger that the murderer murdered many women and he may murder more while we can't do anything due to subjective or objective facts.The case wasn't close in the end ,while we can infer that the two polices may keep investigating if there is some trace of the murderer, because of their responsibility to be a policy.
A haunting score and beautifully atmospheric cinematography by Kim Hyung-gu round out the achievements of this unique and engaging Korean thriller.
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