Memories of Murder: In the Killing Jar

1. “I Felt Nothing”

In September 2019, about halfway between claiming the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May and earning multiple Oscar nominations in January 2020, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite was briefly upstaged by a movie from the director’s past. His second feature, Memories of Murder (2003), had grappled with South Korea’s most chilling cold case: a spree in which ten women and girls were raped and murdered near Hwaseong, about twenty-six miles south of Seoul. (Song Kang Ho, a star of Parasite, plays one of the police detectives obsessed with nabbing the culprit.) According to a May 2020 CNN story, “About 226,000 people lived in the area, scattered among a number of villages between forested hills and rice paddies,” in a region that previously had reported “no real crime to speak of.” The slaughter began in 1986 and continued for five years. A suspect was jailed for one of the crimes in 1989 and released on parole in 2009; the others, however, went unanswered. The specter of what have been called Korea’s first serial killings profoundly spooked the nation: Police investigated over 20,000 people, some even after the statute of limitations expired in 2006. Over two million “man-days” were devoted to the case—nearly 5,500 years, longer by a millennium than Korea itself has been around. You could think of the investigation as an entire civilization built around a singular depravity.

Thirty-three years after the first body was found and sixteen after Memories of Murder became a hit in South Korea, news broke that modern DNA testing had most likely identified the killer, linking one man to several of the victims: Lee Chun-jae, fifty-six, a Hwaseong native already in jail for a 1994 crime in another city. Lee had settled back in the Hwaseong area in 1986, after finishing his mandatory military service; he lived within two miles of most of the murders. Lee eventually confessed to all the killings, plus five others, as well as more than thirty rapes.

One startling revelation: in prison, Lee had seen Memories of Murder. “I felt nothing while watching it,” he told reporters. The “killings were never really on my mind, and I seldom linked myself to them in my thoughts.”

The Parasite juggernaut rolled on. In February 2020, Bong’s tale of two families triumphed on cinema’s biggest stage, the Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for best picture—the first for any foreign-language film. By then, the Lee case had dwindled to a footnote, and as another kind of parasite—the COVID-19 coronavirus—spread across the globe, the Hwaseong case drifted off the news radar, for the most part. In the fall of 2020, Lee apologized to Yoon Seong-yeo, the man jailed for one of the murders, at a retrial to clear the latter’s name.

Lee felt nothing as dramatized versions of his cruelty flashed on the screen. Can we ever watch this movie the same way again?

2. Memories of Memories of Murder

From the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, what’s loosely called the New Korean Cinema redefined what kinds of stories South Korea’s directors could tell. Works by Lee Chang-dong, Hong Sang-soo, Park Chan-wook, and the late Kim Ki-duk shaped a fresh reputation for Korean film worldwide, with movies that felt formally electric and often transgressive. Born in 1969, Bong Joon Ho is the youngest of that corps. If there’s little in common between, say, Hong’s woozy love triangles and Park’s stylized violence, Bong’s early work in retrospect seems to encapsulate these disparate impulses, with its brisk mix of naturalistic acting and suspenseful set pieces. Or maybe the secret is his innate love of hybrid storytelling, mixing moods and methods normally kept apart. His superb feature debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), explores distinctly South Korean concerns—corruption in the academy, canine stew, the legacy of the 1988 Olympics—in and around (and atop and below) a massive Seoul apartment complex. The building functions as a microcosm of South Korean society, its ghosts and unruly appetites banished to the basement—a foretaste of the upstairs/downstairs theme that erupts in Parasite’s postmodern mansion. Enhanced by an antic soundtrack, Barking Dogs Never Bite has a buoyancy that can recall Wes Anderson; a trapped-in-the-closet passage evoking Blue Velvet; and a feisty, hoodie-wearing heroine (Bae Doona, later the avenging archer in Bong’s 2006 The Host) who transforms what begins as a sober morality play into a thing of joy.

Initially, Memories of Murder seems like Barking Dogs’ grim opposite, a reversal so complete that a viewer could sue for whiplash. The earlier film’s sunny, vertiginous heights and grrrl‑power protag are replaced by a rain-drenched, street-level vision of hell in which women figure mainly as part of a gruesome body count. But like its predecessor, Memories wrestles with morality and sanity, and refuses to play by genre rules. (Unlike Dogs, it was a box-office smash in South Korea; The Host, Bong’s politically charged creature feature, would win him a wide international audience.) Memories is a gritty crime saga that can also be seen—even enjoyed—as an absurdist comedy of errors. Early on, what should be a sobering analysis of a murder scene turns into a train wreck, if not an ad hoc amusement park, as the police chief tumbles down a grass embankment, children frolic, and a driver blithely rolls over a crucial bit of evidence. “This is total chaos!” exclaims one detective. Your laughter keeps coming up short, however, every time you glimpse the body, bound and gagged and dressed in red—the reason for the whole performance, yet never the center of attention.

A period piece from which all nostalgia has been eliminated, the film casts a tragic light not just on the barbarically defiled victims but also on the whole nerve-racked nation. For South Korea, the 1980s was a crucial stage on the way to becoming a functioning democracy and an economic powerhouse, and Memories of Murder explicitly reveals the country’s growing pains. (Bong was in high school at the time of the first killings, and later took part in demonstrations while studying sociology at prestigious Yonsei University.) In one brief but indelible scene, a student demonstration against authoritarian president Chun Doo-hwan is violently suppressed by the same police force charged with tracking the elusive killer.

The film’s prologue gains in power with every viewing—it is a three-minute model of emotion and understatement, packed with beauty and horror. A crew-cut boy in a vast rice paddy, his face framed by golden stalks, patiently nabs a grasshopper. He looks up and sees a tractor chugging along the dirt road that cuts through the fields. Six other boys, some with butterfly nets, chase the tractor gleefully, as though any visitor from beyond the farm is a novelty. Bathed in light, the line of small figures seems at once alive and ancient, a rural procession that could have happened at practically any point in the past century or—swapping method of transport—since time immemorial. A solid-looking man sits on the back of the vehicle, facing his youthful pursuers in the open air as they cheerfully jeer the “junk” car. He shoos the kids back, but their spirits are too high.

This passenger is Inspector Park (Song), a local law enforcer who looks as though he is completely in his element, even as a trace of fatigue or sadness flickers across his wide, kind face. The straw-hatted farmer stops the tractor; the boy watches, holding a jar containing the trapped insect behind his back. As Park passes, he gently musses the kid’s hair. It’s a natural, almost fatherly, gesture he might have performed a hundred times, as though he feels connected to all the children in the area. This is the last moment he will seem so benevolent or dignified. He knows he’s about to see something bad. He just doesn’t know how bad—nor that it will be but the first in a series of shocks.

The farmer indicates a covered ditch. Park finds a scrap of mirror with which to bend the sunlight into the darkened space. We get the reverse angle: a pale corpse, knee up, with Park’s face visible at the far end. As the light hits, a cluster of tiny bugs disperses across the flesh. Park’s attention is drawn away by the laughter of the kids, now horsing around with undergarments found in the field—i.e., evidence. He scolds them, and the boy who has been crouched near him, watching, echoes his words verbatim: “That’s important, don’t touch!” “That’s important, don’t touch!” The boy persists with the repetition, mimics his motions, but Park keeps his cool. He knows that everyone’s life is going to change. The age of innocence is about to expire.

There is a Nabokovian touch that I missed the first few times I watched the film: when Park first shines the light on the body, a grasshopper can be seen clinging to her bare leg. Is it the same insect from the start of the film, or another one that has just materialized? Is this a commentary on the indomitable course of nature, or a devilish detail tucked away for obsessive viewers, evidence of Bong’s careful patterning? (Later, there’s a devastating moment involving a Band-Aid that Bong has said is a nod to Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita.)

The shock of seeing the corpse blinds us to this directorial thumbprint—until we look again, and again, and again. It seems less like a trick of the light than of time itself that I noticed this second grasshopper only after the killer was caught in real life.

During an October 8, 2019, event at the New York Film Festival, Bong passed along the rumor that the real-life killer had seen the film three times in prison when it was broadcast on TV. One wonders: Did he see the jar behind the boy’s back as being empty or full?

3. The Savage Detectives

Park is part of a trio of investigators at the heart of the film. His dedication is outweighed by his haphazard approach and possible human rights violations. Placing undue trust in his own instincts, he claims, for instance, that by staring at the mug shots of the fourteen men they’ve questioned, the answer will eventually hit him. “My eyes can read people,” he says to the first of his two chiefs in the film (Byun Hee Bong). “It’s how I survive as a detective.” The cruel joke is that his gut is generally wrong. His weakness for bad ideas, superstition, and tin-pot theories scrambles an already complicated mission. At one point, he proudly presents to the police chief the fact that no pubic hair was found at the murder site. The culprit, he reasons, must be a “total baldy”—indeed, possibly a Buddhist monk. (His submerged stakeout at the public baths, casting glances at passing junk, is the film’s crudest laugh-out-loud moment.) He’s quick to berate a greasy‑haired suspect (“Do women like guys like you?”) and mocks a female colleague (Koh Seo Hee), who has actually hit upon their strongest lead yet, for having read too many mystery novels.

Park is a hot mess, by turns garrulous, thuglike, petty, and ridiculous, but Song’s staggering performance makes him altogether human. (He’s also the only one of the three detectives with any semblance of a family life.) Though not above planting evidence and busting heads, he leaves the worst of it to the id of the trio, his right-hand (or right-foot) man, Inspector Jo (Kim Roe Ha), whose interrogation trademark is to put a cloth bootee over one shoe before stomping on a suspect. Jo’s fury extends in all directions—not just to the potential killers but also to college students, those opinionated critics of authoritarian structures, who, in his fevered imagination, are having orgies with their professors.

It’s Park, however, who levels a flying kick—on a grassy hillside, in broad daylight—at a stranger in town who is hassling a skittish woman. In a sort of twisted meet-cute, the man turns out to be his new colleague on the case, Inspector Seo from Seoul (Kim Sang Kyung, who played the louche actor in Hong Sang-soo’s 2002 Turning Gate). He’s ostensibly bringing his big-city brain and scientific methodology, and for much of the film he appears to be the calm superego who can point out all that’s wrong in Park and Jo’s sleuthing. By the end, alas, he’s even more tormented than his partners, lashing out futilely in the maze of death that Bong has constructed.

In my memory, before a recent revisiting, the film had a shaggy-dog quality, alternating between nervous laughs and violence. It was one wrong move after another, an illusion sustained by Song’s scatterbrained Park, and by the twist that the killer is never caught. In fact, Memories is a model of controlled storytelling that only appears to be “total chaos,” a film that rewards multiple viewings. In an early scene, Park unsuccessfully attempts to make love to his girlfriend (Jeon Mi Seon), a failure he accepts with equanimity: “I think it fell out.” Tenderly, he rests his head in her lap as she uses a small scoop to remove his earwax. It’s during this ear-cleaning ritual, appropriately, that she delivers a piece of gossip that starts a doomed chain reaction: she has heard that Kwang-ho (Park No Shik), a cognitively disabled man, used to follow one of the victims around town.

In a damning portrait of official ineptitude and sanctioned sadism, Park and the iron-heeled Jo work over the diminutive, disfigured Kwang-ho, eliciting a garbled quasi confession. (The brutal treatment of the disabled suspect is so troubling that I know at least one Bong fan who refuses to see Memories; this time around, I was reminded of Lee Ki-ho’s searing 2009 comic novel At Least We Can Apologize, in which a pair of asylum inmates are beaten so regularly for things they didn’t do that they invent wrongdoings to expedite their repentance.) Confident that the case is closed, Park and Jo smugly pose for the papers, wondering what sort of headlines will accompany their photo, only for Seo to point out that Kwang-ho’s webbed fingers could never have trussed up the body with such rigor. (Kwang-ho seems to be based at least partly on the man the real-life police put in jail, Yoon Seong-yeo, whose childhood polio “had left him with a limp so bad that he had been exempted from compulsory military service,” according to CNN.)

A chance glimpse of a nocturnal perv and a creepy series of postcards to a radio DJ lead the trio to a married quarry worker named Jo (Ryu Tae Ho) and a bookish factory hand named Park (Park Hae Il)—their vast and alien places of employment jarring, even thrilling, glimpses of the heavy industry looming near the fields and narrow streets. Jo confesses all too readily, while Park challenges them at every turn. (The first interrogation of the latter is intimately lit, as though the police and Park were having a first date at a classy restaurant.) That these two suspects share names with two of their pursuers is intentional, of course—and all the more alarming for being presented in such a subdued fashion. The real killer eludes capture, and leaves in his wake a pair of doubles who are all guilty of something.