12/30/2023 0 Comments Memories of a murderer netflix reviewThe specter of the citizens soon to be cruelly murdered by these same institutions of power is very present in the subtext of the film, and the mind of the viewer. Bong doesn’t directly address the authoritarian environment, but early on, we see a scene of police violently suppressing protestors later, the station chief is denied extra officers to help on a night the team knows a murder will most likely take place, because they’re out crushing a protest somewhere else. Ever-present in the background is Chun Doo-hwan’s brutal regime which infamously carried out the Gwangju Massacre in 1988. ![]() Overlaying the work is a brilliantly realized atmosphere of suffocating gloom and dread that grows as more women are found raped and murdered, and every clue leads the detectives to a dead end. Unsurprisingly, Bong’s filmmaking is stylish and highly effective. Even the so-called “brainy” cop Tae-yoon is only smart in comparison to the other two, and takes far too long to understand a clue that was staring them all in the face early on-with tragic consequences. Either way, the film shows us a police force that is brutally and indiscriminately violent, highly misogynistic, and recklessly incompetent. ![]() Tae-yoon doesn’t intervene in these unjust arrests until the last possible second, but he’s so inscrutable that it’s hard to tell if he doesn’t care about the suspects’ suffering, or if he simply waits until he has enough evidence to let them go. Tae-yoon, on the other hand, quietly and contemptuously watches as Doo-man and Young-gu plant evidence, torture suspects into confessing, and freely commit violence against the townspeople when they think they might be guilty of something, or even when they’re just in a bad mood. Tae-yoon volunteered to come from Seoul to work on the Hwaseong murders, and Doo-man is suspicious of his book learning and intellectual ways, telling him to go work for the FBI-here in Korea they investigate by pounding the pavement with their feet. Song Kang-ho ( Parasite) plays protagonist and lead detective Doo-man, investigating the case with his partner Young-gu and newly arrived inspector Tae-yoon, played by Kim Sang-kyung ( The Vanished, The Crowned Clown). ![]() The film begins in 1987, a year after the murders have started, with the city of Hwaseong under a cloud of unease, and the detectives working on the case increasingly frustrated. The still-open case has been a common subject for film and television in the last decade, including Signal and Tunnel, but Bong was the first to tackle it in what has become a modern classic. The case is known as the first instance of serial murders with a clear modus operandi in South Korea, and remains unsolved to this day, often drawing comparisons to the Zodiac Killer. Memories of Murder is Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 retelling of the real-life Hwaseong serial murders which occurred from 1986-91 in the rural city of Hwaseong, in Gyeonggi Province. 43 JJ Memories of Murder captures the lingering brutality of the Hwaseong killings by Anisa
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