I Would Like to See It: Memories of Murder (Patreon)

Like many South Koreans who came of age during the civil unrest of the 1980s, Bong Joon-ho has a healthy disdain for cops. You can see it in virtually every film he’s produced, from the oppressive dystopian regime of Snowpiercer to the cloying bureaucratic apparatchiks of The Host, but nowhere has it ever been clearer than in his second film, Memories of Murder. Cops beat civilians who comment on the public rape trial of a fellow officer, hang suspects from the ceiling by their ankles, beat and trick and coerce confessions out of the unprepared and defenseless, and otherwise run roughshod over the inhabitants of their small town. Bong plays masterfully with tone to texture his police characters and draw the viewer into their impulsive, selfish pocket of reality, a place where riots and protests are professional inconveniences and reality plays second fiddle to simple impatience and the snap judgments of whatever brute happens to be handling a case. More experienced directors have tried and failed to move so deftly between comedy, horror, and tragedy, but Bong is at his nimblest here.

Sentimental music underscores a shot of lead detective Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) looking mournfully at his maimed colleague Seo Tae-yoon’s (Kim Roi-ha) empty boot cover, used to protect his lovingly cared-for army boots from the consequences of his frequent flying kicks and suspect stompings. Officers repeatedly manhandle and batter a developmentally disabled young man, Kwang-ho (Park No-shik). Bong’s film strips every possible inch of coolness from each act of police violence, showing it repeatedly for the buffoonish incompetence it is. Again and again the police bungle their own investigation with outbursts of pointless viciousness, lazy assumptions, and sheer stupidity. It’s Kim Sang-kyung as Seoul-based detective Seo Tae-yoon who brings the whole whirlwind of incompetence and brutality together, baiting us along with his slick methods, movie star good looks, and apparent principles until Bong brilliantly uses the introduction of a plausible suspect to show he’s every bit the single-minded thug his rural colleagues are.

All of this stupidity, pathos, and dehumanizing cruelty is broken up with almost comic book paneling precision by a succession of startlingly crisp colors. The dreamy summer gold of the field where we begin and end our story, the sickly gray of dead flesh against the antiseptic white of institutional architecture, the soft browns and reds of a local bar — Bong’s use of color makes his frequent tonal shifts feel natural, subliminally explaining each one without having to stoop to exposition. Gold tells us the story is beginning in a place of idealistic possibility. Gray tells us it has met reality. The increasingly bleak green color grading communicates the ongoing desaturation of that initial promise contained within one of the oldest and simplest story hooks of all time: a detective comes upon a body. And what happens when that same man, now a salesman, returns many years later to the place where it all began? The rusted machine groans and shivers and comes to life again, his judging eye turning now to us, reminding us that nothing separates us from the victims of police suspicion and violence but the thin and permeable skin of location and happenstance.