Memories of Murder

The centrepiece of our Bong Joon-ho retrospective is for many of us, his masterpiece — and it has never looked sharper than its recent digital restoration. His second feature, this police procedural really made the world stand up and take notice.

As we have come to expect from the director of Parasite, The Host and Mother, the film mixes eccentric humour and suspense. Based on a true story of the hunt for a serial killer in the mid 1980s (while South Korea was under a military dictatorship), the movie pokes merciless fun at the multiple shortcomings of the detectives working the case, two provincial oafs who tend to punch first and ask questions later, and a third who brings big city expertise to the job, but with no better results.

Yet the slapstick and even the mystery are only part of the story. Bong also draws us into the bigger dilemma of South Korea’s precipitous relationship with its unstable twin to the North. As the film unfolds we begin to realize everyone in this story is a victim, lashing out in various ways. In its own idiosyncratic way, it’s a movie to put on a par with Zodiac and The Silence of the Lambs.

The screening on Saturday, January 18 will feature a special presentation by Lisa Coulthard, Professor of Cinema Studies, UBC, as part of our Bong 1-7 symposium.

Lisa’s research focuses on the areas of cinematic violence, film philosophy, film sound, genre cinemas, action film, feminism, and violence in cinema.

One of the greatest films of the last 15 years.

Luke Baldock, The Hollywood News (2018)

As the loose ends and the innocent suspects pile up, the comedy of errors becomes a drama of terrors… How the hell does a film this tonally out there, with characters this lunkheaded and at times even cruel and hateful, manage to be so indescribably moving?

Bilge Eberi, Village Voice (2017)

A tour-de-force.

The Guardian