A near-excellent police procedural about a real-life, unsolved series of murders in middle-80s Korea. Often funny, occasionally thrilling — even moving. And with an excellent central performance by Kang-ho Song that compares–favorably–with Hackman in French Connection…. I kid you not. I didn’t think it as strong as Chan-Wook Park’s vengeance stuff, but it’s pretty damn good.
No analysis–just a strong rec.
I started to watch this not long after I read Reynolds’ post, and I fell asleep ten minutes in. I think it was the after-effect of whatever I drank for dinner. Now, 18 months later, I just watched it the whole way through, and it is magnificent. I’m not sure what to say about it except that everything in it works. It would be on my top ten list for whatever year it came out. Everyone on the list should watch it. And you don’t even have to put it in your queue because it is available on the Netflix ‘Watch Now’ feature. You can dial it up anytime, anywhere on any computer. If you watch more than ten minutes, you’ll be hooked.
I’m posting after some time, and I wanted to write about this film first because I loved it so much! I haven’t seen too many Korean films, but this is one of the best that I’ve seen.
First, it’s a brilliantly written film. It’s so tightly constructed with so many intersting facets, almost every scene so brilliant with subtlety. It’s funny and frightening; familiar and disturbing.
Where to begin… it falls under the genre of the police story, but the film undermines the genre itself in so many ways. The fact that the film is based on a real unsolved case has something to do with it, but it goes beyond that by questioning many procedural elements of detection: evidence, witnesses, logic, instict, etc. The film also has historical/political resonance–the back drop of student demonstrations and police brutality. What about the good cop/bad cop genre? Except here the good and bad cops switch roles, so that they are both good and bad. The film is also about the anxieties of modernization. The setting–rural Korea–is a place of monstrosity as well as nostalgia (one interesting note: in the Korean title the word for “memories” really means something like “fond memories,” which suggests nostalgia). The first scene and the last scene brilliantly play out these opposites: beautiful rural scenary, children playing, and the dead body stuffed in a concrete waterway. Also in the context of Korea’s emergence in the global market in the 1980’s, all the rhetoric associated with the West–American DNA testing and so on–are very interesting too.
Ultimately the film is about loss–I was going to say failure but loss may be a better word. Loss of bodies, loss of innocence, loss of truth, loss of the killer, loss of some rural tranquility, loss of naivete (both personal and national)… but the film also questions this sense of loss with the trope of nostalgia. Were these things there in the first place? The film participates in recreating this sense of nostalgia too, even for murder. So what we see and hear is inevitably suspect–like the Song Kang-Ho character who after boasting of his instinct in telling the criminals apart just by looking at them confesses he can’t tell the rapist apart from the victim’s brother, and the quasi-confessions that never means what they are saying. At the end, there is simply nowhere else we can turn to find the bad guy, to find the answers, but only to where we started, the very first scene of the film, and thematically through memory/nostalgia.
I highly recommend this film to everyone. I saw it by chance on ON Demand and made Arnab see it as well a few weeks ago. Maybe some of you have it for free on your cable as well.
I wrote something about this a while back but I will cut and paste because I too think this is a remarkable film. From its very first shot of a young boy in a field of golden grain, Bong’s film offers up striking visual style coupled with an off-kilter, sardonic tone. Indeed, the first two thirds of this police procedural narrative plays like a macabre comedy. But underneath the surface lurks more compelling tensions: police corruption, national dysfunction, intuition at odds with science, eye for an eye vengeance versus the rule of law and, finally, human irrationality at odds with more modern (idealized?) notions of enlightened rationality. The final twenty-five minutes or so are quite powerful as these tensions wiggle their way to the surface. There are no easy answers or comforting solutions and the viewer is left uncertain and off-balance.
David Walsh, writing for the World Socialist Web, captures, for me, the strengths and horrors of the film best when he writes:
“The picture drawn is of a society so dysfunctional, so dominated by violence and the ‘memory’ of previous violence and repression—decades of ruthless and cruel military dictatorship—that a mere serial killer disappears in its midst. The savage methods of interrogation, the backwardness in every regard, the use of the police primarily to control and oppress the population—all of these make ’solving the crime’ an impossibility. Which crime would that be? And which criminal? Too much damage has already been done to the population and its psyche. The 10 rape-murders inevitably get lost in the shuffle.â€
Powerful stuff. If forced to compare, The Host feels like a step backward.
i liked the film a lot too (certainly far more than r-point which we also watched recently (somehow i am forced to watch korean movies while sunhee refuses to watch any hindi movies). i don’t know that i have a whole lot left to add since sunhee basically stole everything i said to her after we finished the movie, but i will add that one of the things i enjoyed was the multi-generic feel: comedy, horror, suspense all together, and often at the same time. and i actually liked it better than all of chan-wook park’s revenge stuff, with the exception of oldboy.
david walsh’s allegorical reading is pretty good too.