Memories of Murder Review

Memories of Murder is a 2003 South Korean mystery drama written/directed by Bong Joon-ho and co-written by Kwang-rim Kim/Shim Sung-bo. The story for the film was based on the unsolved Zodiac murders from the 1970s.



Story

A group of police officers try to solve a collection of sexually violent murders in the South Korean countryside. That's pretty much it as far as setup goes. According to Roger Ebert's review of the film the setup is used as an excuse to explore and critique different parts of South Korean society during the 1980s, but I never really picked up on that outside of a few instances like the constant abuse the police use in interrogating suspects and a demonstration against then president/dictator Chun Doo-hwan.



The characters are well-realized, but oddly developed. When they're first introduced they all have very definable personalities and attitudes towards their job. Detective Park (Kang-ho Song) is lazy and cuts corners to solve the case. Detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung) is more thorough and focused on the case. From these starting points, the film chooses to make their respective arcs pretty interesting: Park becomes more somber and serious about the murder case and Seo becomes so obsessed with finding the murderer that he stops listening to reason. Unfortunately, their arcs are barely given any attention until the last 20 minutes of the film when their personalities change on a dime. Seriously, looking back on the film I can't recall any steady degradation in Seo or sobriety in Park. It's as if Joon-ho saw Se7en and said to himself, "Hey, let's see if I can do the sloppy, not as well paced version of that!"



There's also a character in this film who encompasses another of the film's big problems on a narrative level: a lot of what are supposed to be big moments in the film don't feel earned at all because of lack of buildup. At one point a character who's been around for the whole movie actually commits suicide and I felt nothing but confusion. "Where did that come from? I didn't get a suicidal depression vibe from him. Was that supposed to be his arc? Did he even have an arc?" So many times throughout the film what should be huge moments of drama and tragedy end up being head-scratchers because the characters weren't developed enough to care or even understand what their personalities were.



The script has the same problem that I find to be strangely prevalent in every Asian film I've ever seen: people will stop talking about whatever it was they were discussing in the middle of the conversation and go on to a completely different train of thought just for the sake of moving the plot along. I don't know whether to blame this on cultural differences or just poor translation, but it makes for a weird, distracting experience. I suppose the dialogue is mostly okay besides that, sounding natural enough while delivering exposition.



Technical

The technical aspects are what you should see the movie for, particularly in the cinematography. Joon-ho does a really good job at directing your attention to what you're supposed to be looking at as well as being practical with his shot setups. Normally when two people are having a conversation in a movie the cinematographer will setup multiple shots and shoot the entire conversation from each shot, making it a long, exhausting process for the actors and an exercise in redundancy since you'll only be using 20% of the coverage in the final cut anyway. Joon-ho gets around this problem by shooting the entire ensemble in a single shot and using clever blocking to tell the stories he wants the audience to be invested in. For example, if he wants the audience to focus on just two actors, but there are three actors in the frame, have the third actor just leave in some way or dolly the shot closer to the subjects effectively cutting superfluous characters out of the frame. This also makes for good storytelling, as exemplified by one scene where three stories are all going on at the same time and each one compliments and comments on the other. It's amazing to witness such masterfully crafted visual storytelling.



This kind of in-frame blocking, however, does raise some problems in editing. For example, in said conversation where only the two participants are in the frame, you can't just cut to somebody outside the frame who's listening in on the conversation because it's disorienting. The audience kind of forgot he was there and it's disorienting to take us out of this conversation we've become invested in a jump to what looks like a completely different location.



The acting is pretty much great from the entire cast. Kang-ho Song and Kim Sang-kyung manage to sell both sides of their characters despite being given an unbalanced script and No-shik Park gives a particularly convincing performance as a mentally-handicapped suspect.



Summary: Anybody who's even thinking about having a career in directing needs to study this film. The blocking and cinematography are perfect and should be imitated. However, if you're looking at this film for any other reason you might find it a bit disappointing and kind of messy.