Director Bong Joon-ho’s crime-thriller Memories of Murder (2003) established him, early in his career, as a fearless and honest storyteller. Set in Gyeonggi Province in the late 80s, it chronicles the fruitless search for the perpetrator of a string of real-life rapes and murders, amidst investigative corruption and insufficient resources.
One of the last scenes in the film depicts a vital interaction between three characters: Park Doo-man, a headstrong and self-assured detective; Seo Tae-yoon, his more level-headed and analytical partner; and Park Hyeon-gyu, their prime suspect. After the murderer targets a young girl whom Tae-yoon befriends earlier on, he visits Hyeon-gyu’s house and takes him to a nearby train track where he vengefully beats him beside an unwinding tunnel. Doo-man interrupts the confrontation with the newly arrived test results which will reveal whether the killer’s DNA matches Hyeon-gyu’s. The rain does not relent.
Even from the outset, Tarō Iwashiro’s score establishes the futility of the detectives’ continued actions and compounds the changes they have undergone throughout the investigation. Tae-yoon, once a stickler for hard evidence, is so desperate for a legal excuse to shoot Hyeon-gyu that he orders him to confess to the murders. In fact, he spends most of the scene wielding his unholstered handgun. He opens the envelope: the results are inconclusive. He says, “This document is a lie. I don’t need it.” And Doo-man, who claims to identify culprits by looking them in the eyes, now no longer trusts his instincts. Yet they are no closer to convicting the perpetrator than when they began.
A train speeds past, shredding the damp test results beneath its wheels. The last thing we see is the suspect, neither wholly guilty nor innocent, walking away into the tunnel’s depths. A final shot from within the tunnel itself isolates two miserable silhouettes dwarfed by a stark abyss, as Iwashiro’s Defeat, and the screen with it, fades on a sombre note.
What ultimately makes this scene so effective is its emphasis on uncertainty, desperation, and hopelessness at the film’s conclusion. Its proxemic and thematic simplicity, in contrast with the contrived action set pieces and uninspired denouements with which the genre is typically saturated, highlights the severity and reverence with which Joon-ho treats these events, encouraging the audience to reckon with the reality of failure and injustice.
The true killer (so they say) was identified in 2019.
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash