Scott Vander Werf: David, have you seen Memories of Murder?
David Hast: Yes, I have. I saw it because you told me I needed to see it. You scolded me because it's by the Korean director Bong Joon Ho, who's widely known in the United States now, of course, for Parasite, which won best picture and best director and best screenplay back in, what was it, about 2019, 2020.
And I've seen a lot of his films, and we were talking about him. And then you started talking about Memories of Murder and I hadn't seen it, which was shocking to you because of course many people, a lot of people think it's his greatest film.
SVW: I really think that all of his films are great in one way or another. And, but this is my favorite and this is a film that I saw originally probably in 2008 or 2009. It was after The Host had come to the U.S and that was the first film that really broke him in the U.S was The Host…
DH: the horror film, The Host…
SVW: which is, yeah, monster movie, which was in 2006 came to the U.S in 2007.
DH: And Memories of Murder is 2003. It was only his second movie.
SVW: It totally electrified me. And it was a movie that I saw and then I saw again. And every time I saw it, it stayed with me for days.
DH: It's a profound film. And after I watched it the first time, I rewatched it again just a couple days ago. It's just such a moving film. And yet it doesn't start that way, does it? Even though it's about murder, it's about a terrible subject, right murder.
SVW: It's based on a series of serial killings in a rural province in South Korea during the 1980s and this was when Bong Joon-ho was actually in high school at the time that this movie was made and at the time that the throughout the years it was an unsolved series of murders that have since been solved. And that is not really a spoiler because that's not really what the movie is not about catching the killer.
Even though you would think that you know, a detective movie is about solving the crimes. This is more like in terms of the Hollywood filmmaking of Zodiac, which is a great movie by David Fincher about the infamous Zodiac serial killer in California from the 1970s.
DH: Zodiac was later, right?
SVW: Yeah. And Zodiac followed. It was a year or two after Memories of Murder.
DH: Yes. This film, I mean, it, it, the main characters are cops, and they're the homicide squad in this small rural province and because they're small and they haven't dealt with something like this before, another cop from Seoul from the capital of South Korea comes in and really he and the actor Song Kang-ho who's in Parasite, and many other great Korean films, those two police officers one from the province one from the city are the main actors. So it's the main characters, it's a police procedural, but the further you get into it, the more you realize it's really more about these characters and the effect that this is having on them.
SVW: And the fact that they become disillusioned because they think that they have their specific technique of being a detective, and Song Kang Ho, his thing is all about intuition, looking into people's eyes and being able to know whether someone is guilty because he's just looking at them and he figures it out.
DH: But he's wrong, he's crazy, you know, it makes no sense. And even more so, their technique, these guys in the, these provincial cops, they're doing everything wrong and what would be illegal here. They're, they're planting, they're, they're tipping that they have a suspect and they're interrogating the suspect. And then they, you know, give them hints and tell them things. You know, it's ridiculous. It's like it's the cliche of they're just trying to get a conviction. Right. And they repeatedly bring in the wrong suspects.
SVW: Although I would say they're not like cops who just want to get the conviction to get the score. They actually think that this is the way that you would, you know, you beat it out of the suspect. You actually think this is the guy that did it. They think these are people, the people that they beat and are actually they think they're the real killers.
DH: But it's terrible policing, right?
SVW: It is. And the cop that comes in from Seoul, he knows this. He's into evidence, but he becomes so disillusioned through the course of the story.
DH: What makes this movie for me is that it's almost comic at times. I mean, not like 48 hours kind of cop comedy, but you're laughing at the incompetence and the silliness of these provincial cops. And they aren't taking it all that seriously, even though they're terrible murders of these women. And even the cop from Seoul, he's very professional, but he's not emotionally connected to it.
And at a certain point, it's really act three of the film. It's really about two thirds of the way through. A murder or two happened, and you just see these guys starting to fall apart emotionally. And it's no game anymore.
SVW: It's no game, and the one detective from Soul has a brief connection with one of the victims, and that sort of pushes him over the edge. But you also see, like, this, I didn't realize the first few times that I saw this how much this movie is based on what was happening in South Korea in the 1980s, that the government was heavily corrupt. There was large student protests that were happening and the national police were just beating the protesters. And Bong Joon-ho saw all this as a high school student and recognized that he didn't trust the government, he didn't trust the police. And that's sort of the backdrop to this.
And then also they didn't, you know, they don't, they have to send DNA out of the country to the U.S. In real life, they sent it to Japan because they don't have the tools there. They didn't have the tools.
DH: Right. It was in the 1980s, DNA identification was in its infancy.
SVW: But even the cop from Seoul, he doesn't even drive into this province. He's, it looks like he's hitchhiking. He probably took a bus and then he's walking into the town.
DH: Yeah, there's a funny scene with the first time his introduction is he gets attacked by the other cop.
SVW: Because the cop thinks that he's abusing a woman on the side of the road.
DH: Right.
SVW: But you touched on something that I think is really one of the things that I love about this filmmaker is that how much he can take a subject matter that's very serious, it's very dramatic, and he infuses his weird humor into it.
DH: He does. But then also a level of seriousness that sometimes you don't see it in American crime movies. He does both. I mean, maybe you can articulate it, but it's different than an American crime film on a similar topic.
SVW: Very much so, but he does it on all of his films. He does it in The Host, which is sort of his take on giant monster movies. And there are scenes in there where it becomes sort of slapstick comedy.
He does it in Okja, which is the film that he directed for Netflix, which is about vegetarianism and about the meat industry, but according to interviews with him, it's really overall about capitalism.
And so there's this weird way that he uses humor that is very much unlike any film director that I've ever seen in the U.S.
DH: It's like misdirection. You think the film is about one thing and it is about that thing, but then you realize more so it's about something else.
Like Parasite was like that too, right? There's funny parts in Parasite. And at first we just thought it was gonna be almost maybe like a comedy about these poor people getting a job with rich people to steal some scam ‘em a little. We didn't realize the level of those people who saw the movie and part of what made it great was when it kind of turned into a horror film it completely changed its tone.
(Movie audio clip)
DH: Alright Scott, well thank you for telling me about this movie and getting me to watch it.
SVW: You know, this is one of those movies that every single time that I've watched this film, it stayed with me for days. Even a day later, I might be doing, washing the dishes and I'm thinking about this movie. It always has a very profound effect on me.
