I’m bored by police procedurals. We’re shown a crime, now let’s watch the police solve it. These dramas are usually cliché-ridden and full of red herrings. Writers seem to be bored with trying to intelligently perplex the viewer, resorting instead to cinematic cheats like not showing you all the clues, or outrageously plotted cheats that you could never guess. Or they’re too simple and you guess it right away. I’ve lost patience over the years. So now, I avoid movies and TV series in this genre. There’s an awful lot of them to avoid.
I didn’t know quite what sort of film Memories of Murder was going to be. I was half expecting a psycho-on-the-loose thriller. I wanted to see it because I’d already seen the director’s next film, The Host, which broke box office records in South Korea last summer. Having enjoyed that so much, I had my hopes set pretty high. I didn’t know I was getting a police procedural movie. I also didn’t know I was going to enjoy it so much.
It could have been because of the faraway locations, but this movie felt worlds apart from the usual murder mystery. Besides enjoying the story, I was learning about the quirks of living in South Korea in the mid 1980s, when the country was under military rule, with the public enduring regularly staged curfews and air raid drills.
The central characters are detectives in the local police force who are trying to catch a serial rapist who also murders his victims. Under-equipped and under-staffed, they try methods both fair and foul, and follow hunches that are both unlikely and even unscientific.
I was wrong-footed by the opening announcement – many thrillers and horror films open by saying that ‘the following is based on a true story’. Opening statements, like in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Picnic At Hanging Rock, duped me for years into thinking the stories actually happened, which makes watching the films almost mind-blowing. When I found out that it was just a dramatic ploy, it’s both a relief (for the victims) and a realization that I’ve been duped. Rather than be fooled again, I chose to ignore the opening statements, and assumed it was pure fiction.
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