"Memories of Murder" (2003)

When I eventually update my Top Movies Rankings, Memories of Murder (2003) will almost certainly place near the top. It is a fresh and layered take on one of my favorite guilty pleasures: the serial-killer procedural.

Bong Joon-ho offers a fictionalized account of Korea’s first known serial killer. At the time of filming the case was still unsolved, but that hardly matters, because the film is not ultimately about catching or preventing murders. It is about how ordinary people confront evil and danger in the world. How do we fight it?

The story follows two detectives with opposite temperaments. Park Doo-man relies on instinct, hunches, and raw emotion. He thinks he can feel evil. Seo Tae-yoon, by contrast, trusts reason, logic, and hard evidence. Around them orbit two other figures: a young female officer who quietly contributes but is ignored by the men around her, and a violent brute whose interrogation methods reveal that evil can be found within the system itself.

Together they chase the killer yet remain one step behind at every turn. False leads abound, and the suspects they pursue prove innocent. Bong makes it clear that neither intuition nor science is enough: Doo-man’s instincts fail him, and Seo’s data trails collapse into uncertainty. Even when they corner a convincing suspect, the evidence is inconclusive. They cannot know for sure who the monster is.

Adding to the ambiguity, nearly the entire film (except for its bookends) is shot in muted, desaturated tones, as if the story itself is a hazy, unreliable memory. The deeper question seems to be this: How can humanity combat evil when, first, we cannot perceive enough of reality to identify it with certainty, and second, when traces of evil exist within all of us?

The film ends without resolution. Years later, Park Doo-man revisits the site of the first murder and hears that the killer himself once returned there. But no description of the man can be offered—he was too ordinary, too unremarkable. In that haunting moment Doo-man looks directly at the camera, suggesting the killer could be anyone. The evil could be us.

In real life, the murderer was finally caught years after the film’s release. Chillingly, he had seen Memories of Murder in theaters. He felt nothing. The unsettling question is left for us: when we face evil—whether out there in the world or in here within ourselves—do we feel anything at all?