Memories of Murder

A strange deconstruction of the whodunit, shot as beautifully as Bong Joon-ho's The Host and every bit as unpredictable.

Bong Joon-ho has been warping genre for a while now: in The Host, he’s transcending the monster horror formula, and this previous movie is a police procedural that’s equally infused with dark humor, outbursts of violence, and human moments that are all the more touching because you didn’t see them coming. Byeon Hie-bong, who played the slacker father in The Host, is a small-town cop trying to solve Korea’s first serial murder case. It all starts like any episode of CSI or Prime Suspect, but somehow the cops keep falling down, they can’t keep farmers from running over the evidence with tractors, and they’re not above beating confessions out of mentally disabled witnesses.