Scene of the crime

Bong Joon-ho's "Memories of Murder" (2003) is the film that put him on the map internationally. His later hits, mainly the creature-feature "The Host" (2006), would make him part of Asian mainstream worldwide. Entertaining as "The Host" was, it's got nothing on the grim, tightening hold of "Memories of Murder". The film plays out like a Korean version of David Fincher's "Zodiac" (2007), a police procedural where viewer frustration is closely aligned with the frustration experienced by the police as they try to catch a serial killer in rural South Korea in 1986.

Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-kyung and Kim Roe-ha star as the investigating detectives. One is boorish and clumsy, with flexible ethical standards; the other is out-and-out physically intimidating; the third is from Seoul and seems more sophisticated than his colleagues, though it's unclear how long this sophistication will last. Inspired by real life events, the plot seems simple: we meet the main characters and follow them in their investigation. Seeing as this is first and foremost a character driven film, we find the characters unravelling as their search keeps turning up false leads and invalid conclusions, and it is this frustration of intent and expectation that creates the film's tension. Also to this film's credit is its constant awareness of what was politically happening in Korea during the 1980s, and how the police was forced to cope without the high-end technological advances that were already available elsewhere in the world.

"Memories of Murder" is compelling. It juxtaposes brutal death with rural tranquility, a motif that comes full circle with the film's powerful and moving ending. We are made to think that sometimes we see the killer, but we cannot be sure since we're only privy to what the detectives know. Once, we are shown the killer for certain, his face blurred and in the distance as he hides in the lush, tall grass. Bong makes the most of the tension derived from contrasting human threat and beautiful nature by putting the one in the other.

More "Zodiac" than "Seven" (Fincher, 1995), the film's even pacing and character focus is on par with that of under appreciated, quiet thriller "Citizen X" (Chris Gerolmo, 1995) where the Soviet government effectively undermined the search for a serial killer because they refused to believe that such evil was possible in their country. In "Memories", it is, in the end, not so much the lack of resources and cooperation that sabotage the murder investigation as the humanity and fragility of the detectives.