thriller – ReWatch List

Road to Perdition (2002)

I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the 20^th century. I’ve always found it fascinating, as so many others have and probably always will, given how much significant stuff happened and how well documented it is, compared to earlier historical periods. I’m not a history buff, and for me it’s always been a layman’s interest, low-key and not very sharply focused. But it has, perhaps inevitably, been supercharged in the past year and a half. Nowadays, any time before Covid belongs to a bygone age of innocence, and the years before the new millennium…come on, now. Of course, my rational mind knows it’s not ancient history—I was, after all, born in the 20^th century, deep enough to remember a bit of it—but now more than ever, it seems like the days of yore, more similar to the murky, distant past than the world we live in.

Tom Hanks, director Sam Mendes, cinematographer Conrad L. Hall, and the rest of their collaborators obviously couldn’t have foreseen the Covid pandemic—or the Trump presidency, or the rise of social media, or any of the other phenomena that now make the early 20^th century feel so far removed from the present. But that fact is, I think, a key reason why Road to Perdition, the solidly good Depression-era gangster movie they all made in 2002, remains so appealing today.

It was only Mendes’s second feature, but he had been a prominent stage director in England since the late 80s, and his debut, American Beauty (1999), had been a massive success, winning several of the most prestigious Academy Awards. (In more ways than one, that movie hasn’t aged particularly well, but it remains an impressive display of Mendes’s skill.) He’s been a dependable, respectable fixture in the industry ever since, making mostly good movies at a measured, steady pace. He made two well-received dramas, Jarhead (2005) and Revolutionary Road (2008), then a sweet-tempered dramedy, Away We Go (2009) that I, like some critics, found unremarkable, and more than a little smug. He made one of the best James Bond movies of all time, Skyfall (2012), promptly followed by one of the worst, Spectre (2015), of which only the spectacular opening tracking shot is worth seeing.[i] Most recently, he went all in on that concept with 1917 (2019), a First World War movie whose single-take conceit was so technically stunning its other elements were not so much overshadowed as rendered practically irrelevant. His work has been criticized, with some justification, as excessively deliberate and composed, holding the emotional core of the story at arm’s length. But it’s impossible to deny his great talents, both as a director of actors (most stars seem eager to work with him, and he guides almost all of them to fantastic performances) and as an elegant visual stylist with a keen eye for detail.

So it is with Road to Perdition, which, unlike some movies I write about here, I wouldn’t call a spotless masterpiece, sublime from start to finish. One could take issue with its rather cold and clinical approach to the story, for example; or with its conception of some supporting characters and the resulting performances: Jude Law as the twisted freelance killer Maguire, and Daniel Craig as the hotheaded Connor Rooney; or with the way that a random but important elderly couple, and the perfunctory episode where the protagonists recuperate at their farm, end up feeling somewhat shoehorned into the larger narrative. Still, these are minor flaws, and all are notably tempered in some way; how significant they are is likely to be different depending on the viewer. I, for one, think the movie would benefit from being a little less aloof, but I understand why Mendes took that approach, and it pays great dividends in other ways. Whatever you think of Law and Craig, neither of them actually has much screen time, and that efficiency of use is a key reason why I find both their performances quite effective. For similar reasons, I don’t mind the interlude at the farmhouse; it’s a bit awkwardly handled, but it quickly and efficiently fulfills its function in the narrative, and it is in keeping with Mendes’s restrained vision for the movie.

None of these issues, certainly, are serious enough to overshadow the movie’s great strengths—with which they are often closely intertwined. Mendes, as we’ve mentioned, has always been great with actors, and whether those supporting characters work for you or not, Road to Perdition is undoubtedly anchored by some fantastic lead performances. It was marketed as a major departure for Tom Hanks—America’s friendliest, most neighborly movie star plays a cold-blooded hit man! There’s some truth to that, and Hanks is more than capable of pulling off the transformation: with a slightly bulked-up frame lurking under a thick overcoat and fedora, and that subtly intimidating moustache, he looks the part of Irish Mob enforcer Michael Sullivan, and despite the character’s outwardly calm demeanor, his willingness to kill comes as no surprise. And yet, the role isn’t quite as radical as the promotional materials claimed; as Stephen Holden writes, “because Sullivan is played by Mr. Hanks, an actor who invariably exudes conscientiousness and decency, his son’s question [whether his father is “a good man” or “no good at all”] lends the fable a profound moral ambiguity… Acutely aware of his sins, Sullivan is determined that his son, who takes after him temperamentally, not follow in his murderous footsteps.”[ii] The ruthless gangster who’s also a devoted husband and father, striving to shelter his family from the violence of his work life, is a classic figure in cinema, and Hanks turns out to be an ideal actor for such a role. He has the dramatic range to convincingly capture both the character’s hard edges and his tender core, and perhaps because of his broader image as the designated decent guy of Hollywood, his performance illustrates more vividly than most how easily a basically decent person, who might otherwise have led a perfectly moral life, can become a killer if they are rescued from deprivation by a violent community like the mob.

That element of the story also comes across especially powerfully because of the masterful performance on the other side of it: the late, great Paul Newman as mob boss and local patriarch John Rooney. It was something of a swan song for the 77-year-old star: his final role in a movie, at least in the traditional sense. (He would go on to appear a few more times on stage, on television, and as a voice actor before his death in 2008.) It’s a perfect part for him, and the Oscar nomination he received for it was not one of those token nods given to an icon at the end of an illustrious career; Mick LaSalle expressed it well when he wrote that “Newman, who has [apparently] been playing too many crotchety geezers lately, finally gets a role that does justice to his gravity and presence. As Rooney, he’s a picture of healthy old age, straight-backed and clear-eyed, but with the look of someone who has seen horrors. Like virtually everything else in Road to Perdition, not much is on the surface of Newman’s performance. Yet every moment is alive with what’s underneath it—the weight of a misspent life, of guilt, of the certainty of damnation.”[iii] Like Hanks, Newman seamlessly captures both sides of his character: the ruthlessness and resulting capacity to inspire fear, as well as the better angels—devotion to those he loves, guilt for the violence he’s done, and desire to limit it as much as possible—struggling for space in the soul of a deeply conflicted man.

Hanks and Newman are superb on their own terms, and their performances are also crucial to the success of Mendes’s subtly unconventional approach. At first glance, this movie seems like a prime example of what’s often called ‘prestige’ filmmaking, in which major studios (DreamWorks and 20^th Century Fox, in this case) attempt to bolster their artistic integrity by bestowing their unmatched financial resources on reputational counterweights to all those frivolous, spectacularly profitable blockbusters—often lavish period pieces that lean into the ‘magic of cinema’ aspect of the medium. Road to Perdition is undoubtedly such a movie, and it bears some of the hallmarks: the star-studded cast, the richly realized Depression-era setting, the mostly classical-Hollywood score by Thomas Newman, and the thematic focus on the emotional complexities of family bonds in the midst of crisis.

Here, that focus rests squarely on fathers and sons, and it’s not limited to the primary, relatively familiar journey of the hardened Sullivan learning to connect with his son, Michael Jr., when the rest of their comfortable existence is violently torn away. The movie explores a triangle of father-son relationships—between Sullivan and Michael, of course, but also between Sullivan and his surrogate father, Rooney, and between Rooney and his biological son, Connor—which feed off each other and collectively serve as the primary driver of the story. Technically, the inciting incident is when Michael, consumed with curiosity about what his father really does for a living, ends up witnessing a murder, leading Connor, who doesn’t trust him to keep the secret, to decide to kill the whole Sullivan family. But Connor’s reckless plan is also motivated by jealously and resentment of the special relationship between Sullivan and Rooney, full of the sort of paternal love and approval that Connor himself craves—and which, going back even further, is the ultimately the reason why Sullivan is involved in the mob in the first place.

The thematic implications of this tangled emotional web, and the story it sets in motion, are interesting and varied, and Road to Perdition does a compelling job of exploring them. As Holden writes, “the movie captures, like no film I’ve seen, the fear-tinged awe with which young boys regard their fathers and the degree to which that awe continues to reverberate into adult life. Viewed through his son’s eyes, Sullivan, whose face is half-shadowed much of the time by the brim of his fedora, is a largely silent deity, the benign but fearsome source of all knowledge and wisdom.” Tyler Hoechlin (in a fine performance for a 14-year-old actor) makes this dynamic clear, but it also persists, in a subtler way, between Sullivan and Rooney, blinding the younger man to the darker sides of their relationship (a definitive highlight of Newman’s performance is the scene in the crypt when he eloquently disabuses Sullivan of his illusions). And it’s certainly the case for Connor, who flails in his efforts to please his father and make a name for himself, and still wilts in the face of the old man’s anger.

And at the same time, we see the same dynamic working in reverse, confirming Rooney’s early pronouncement that “sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers.” Sullivan’s determination to keep his children away from his violent world is complicated even before wife and younger son are killed, by the mounting evidence that Michael has inherited some of the harder edges of his personality. Connor, of course, causes all sorts of problems for Rooney, who, in turn, finally meets his maker at the hands of the surrogate son whom he loved more, but who was, at the end of the day, not his own flesh and blood.

Another closely related theme is the effect of violence on these relationships. Is it possible for a father to shield his son from the cost of his own sins—or even, perhaps, achieve some measure of redemption through that effort? How does exposure to violence affect children, and does it inevitably lead them to violence themselves? These are thorny issues, and the movie doesn’t presume to offer definitive answers. On the latter question, we initially get the pessimistic answer in the characters of Sullivan and especially Connor, whose psychosis seems to be, at least in part, an inevitable result of growing up in the mob. But the ending, in which Michael finds himself unable to pull the trigger, offers a more hopeful conclusion that tempers some of the grimness that came before.

That grimness also stems from the air of inevitability that follows these characters for much of the movie. This isn’t so much about the old truism that it’s impossible to walk away from the mob; in fact, Sullivan is effectively offered that chance multiple times, and he refuses. Nor is it about the damage that the mob does to society; as Roger Ebert notes, “the movie shares with The Godfather the useful tactic of keeping the actual victims out of view. There are no civilians here, destroyed by mob activity. All the characters, good and bad, are supplied from within the mob. But there is never the sense that any of these characters will tear loose, think laterally, break the chains of their fate.”[iv] There are twists and revelations here, but for most of the movie, the main source of audience engagement isn’t a burning desire to find out what will happen, or what a character will do. As Rooney points out, Michael was always going to find out what his father did sometime. Once he does, and Connor sees that he has, and Rooney, enraged at his son’s reckless response to that problem, relents and hugs him tightly, the paths of the main characters are more or less set. In the tradition of classical tragedy, the story feels driven not so much by mounting pressure as by the pull of gravity, as that tangled web of relationships and motivations gently but inexorably nudges the characters toward their fates.

And yet, most of us don’t come out of Road to Perdition feeling that we saw a brutally bleak movie, or a boring one. It may not be particularly ground-breaking in a narrative or thematic sense, but great acting nevertheless makes those aspects powerfully felt, and that gives Mendes the space to put a more distinctive stylistic stamp on it than we often see in this sort of prestige filmmaking. To characterize his style, the first word that comes to mind is ‘minimalist,’ but that’s only true in a narrative sense. The movie is based on a graphic novel by Max Alan Collins, but only loosely, as the screenplay by David Self and some uncredited re-writers (probably including Mendes, in some capacity) ended up departing quite a bit from the source material, adding the Maguire character, toning down the carnage and the brutality of the protagonist—as great an actor as he is, Hanks can’t convincingly play a character known as ‘The Angel of Death’—and distilling the narrative down to its fundamental elements.[v] As a result, the story unfolds at a stately pace, but with great efficiency, and most of the dialogue remaining after all those cuts is concise and expressive, allowing the actors to convey great deal not only through words, but through the other tools of their trade.

A better way to put it is that Road to Perdition is narratively minimalist, but sensorily lavish. It’s simply a lovely movie to experience, in both a visual and auditory sense, and this is the other major reason it’s so engaging. The sound design is understated but highly effective; all gun-related sounds, from shots firing to the slides and clicks of other functions, ring out in harsh contrast to the otherwise subdued soundscape, representing the jarring incursion of violence into everyone’s outwardly respectable lives. And Mendes has a cool habit of subtly jacking up tension at key moments by slowly increasing the volume of a single sound within the scene: music in the other room at a brothel, the whir of a stock market ticker tape during a standoff, or waves breaking outside as Michael tries to pull the trigger on Maguire.

But first and foremost, we’re talking about the visuals here, because they are remarkable. As it was for Newman, Road to Perdition turned out to be a swan song for the legendary cinematographer Conrad L. Hall, who died in 2003, less than a year after the movie came out.[vi] Taking inspiration from the paintings of Edward Hopper, Hall does exquisite things with light, shadow and darkness, crafting a vision of the early-30s Chicago area that’s too gorgeously stylized to be called realistic, yet somehow never completely abandons realism. It would be futile to try to unpack the gorgeous images that result (where would you even begin?), but suffice it to say that I never get tired of looking at them; I think Holden put it best, writing that Hall and Mendes “have created a truly majestic visual tone poem, one that…inspires a continuing and deeply satisfying awareness of the best movies as monumental ‘picture shows.’” Even the thrill of so-called ‘action,’ of which there is a decent amount (this is a gangster movie, after all, in which many people get shot), is mostly conveyed not through stunts, but through visual flourishes that are conspicuous without being overly indulgent. When Michael witnesses the shootout, we see it all from his vantage point, under a door; when Rooney’s men are gunned down, we see the muzzle flash in darkness, then a slow tracking shot, drifting from man to man as they fall; when Sullivan finally gets his revenge on Connor, we see the dead man only in the mirror on a door swinging shut.

This is what I meant earlier, about the 20^th century and the enduring appeal of Road to Perdition. There are many reasons for the lasting popularity of gangster movies, but Mendes, Hall and the rest understood that especially in recent years, a large (and underappreciated) part of the genre’s appeal is simply aesthetic. So they chose to lean in to that element of the story, an effort that involved not only Hall, but also production designer Dennis Gassner, art director Richard L. Johnson, costume designer Albert Wolsky, and the countless artists and technicians working under them. They did a magnificent job, and the result is a movie that, even back in the carefree year of 2002, when they didn’t even have to worry too much about climate change (I mean, they did, but the world wasn’t literally on fire yet), indulges the nostalgia for the 20^th century that we can’t help but feel, even though we know better. Of course we know that clothes in the 30s were pretty uncomfortable, but people sure did look good in them. Of course vehicles back then didn’t work nearly as well as they do today, but god damn, those cars are cool. Of course these cities and towns were pits of despair at that time, but man, those images sure are stunning.

We don’t really wish we were back in that world. But especially amid the madness of 2021, it’s lovely to spend a couple hours there. ◊

[i] Very awesome. The rest of the movie, not so much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbqv1kbsNUY

[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/12/movies/film-review-a-hell-for-fathers-and-sons.html

[iii] https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/HARD-ROAD-Hanks-gets-inside-a-killer-s-head-2823445.php

[iv] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/road-to-perdition-2002

[v] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Perdition#Writing

[vi] Newman and Hall had collaborated before, with impressive results: Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Memories of Murder (South Korea, 2003)

August 3, 2019July 25, 2021 hbswanLeave a comment

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There’s a key life lesson, handed down in different ways by both my parents, that forms the core of my politics and my views about authority in general. For thirty years, my father was the director of a small boys’ summer camp, where I worked as a counselor almost every year into my late twenties. Most evenings during the pre-season ‘Staff Week,’ we would hold semi-formal class sessions about our duties for the upcoming summer. When we discussed leading camping trips, my dad had a phrase that he always used, and which reflected his overall view of the job: “Everything is fine, until it isn’t.” He was talking about good judgment, about maintaining, even in the context of having a good time, a keen awareness that we’re in charge of these kids and responsible for their safety. Maybe they want to wrestle, jump into the water from a high place, or whatever else. It seems a bit reckless, but probably okay, and you don’t want to be an overbearing killjoy, either. And it probably will be fine… unless it isn’t, and then you’re out in the wilderness with a serious situation on your hands, suddenly in real danger of failing in that core responsibility. Which simply isn’t worth it.

My mother, who also ran the camp, would certainly agree, and she came by her convictions in another way, too. She grew up in central Louisiana, moved to Boston after college, and has never returned except to visit her family. She says that even before meeting my dad, she felt no great urge to move back; when I was only starting middle school, she had already lived up north longer than she ever had in Louisiana, and would already have identified more as a New Englander than a Southerner. As a native and (eventually) committed Mainer, I found that hard to fathom, the seeming ease with which she could leave her homeland behind. It’s not like she hates Louisiana; there was no great trauma to drive her away, and only the most uptight snob would impugn the state’s artistic and culinary sensibilities. But in keeping with her law-school education and local-level activism, she was put off by the state’s politics, enough to preclude settling there permanently. It wasn’t necessarily about conservatism, or the tortured, far-from-resolved struggles with racism and class conflict—you’ll find those issues everywhere to some extent, and she would probably have relished the challenge of being the opposition in a deep-red state, as most of her family members have done. What she found hard to stomach was a broader political culture, defined on both sides of the aisle by messy populism and deep-seated corruption. Elected officials of all stripes display a Berlusconi-like ability to stay in (or even rise to) power amid all manner of scandal and malfeasance. My uncle, in his musical Southern drawl, summed up Louisiana politics with a single incisive phrase: “If you ain’t indicted, you ain’t invited.” My mom said that many people, like her relatives, deplore this old-school, easygoing corruption but feel helpless to change it, while far too many others shrug it off as one of the state’s amusing quirks. Maybe some money gets siphoned off, maybe some regulations slip through the cracks, maybe a few positions go to well-connected people who aren’t the most qualified—but that’s just the way we do things here, and it’s harmless anyway, all in good fun, something to shake your head and chuckle at. And most of the time, it is. But then something deadly serious happens (Hurricane Katrina comes to mind) and that shoddy state of affairs suddenly has real ramifications. And it isn’t funny anymore; the state isn’t prepared, the resources aren’t there, and what you end up with is people suffering unnecessarily, because the institutions aren’t functioning the way they’re supposed to.

None of this has anything to do with South Korean cinema, or the artistry of the great director Bong Joon-ho. But similar convictions are at the soulful heart of Memories of Murder, Bong’s strangely masterful 2003 thriller about a rural district terrorized by a serial killer.

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At a glance, there’s little to indicate how nuanced, how intellectually rich, this movie is. The title resembles the tag line of an old-timey pulp thriller (Memories…of Murder!!), and in broad strokes, the movie seems like a Korean version of your typical whodunit mystery. A country town visited by savage violence; an elusive master criminal one step ahead of his police pursuers; a string of female victims raped and strangled with their own undergarments; a pair of mismatched detectives who eventually learn key lessons from one another—we’ve been here before, on CSI and Law & Order, and in countless big-screen detective stories. And Memories of Murder largely works on the same terms as its sensationalist cousins. There are unexpected twists and dramatic arrests, tense interrogations and heated debates between competing interests within the police force. The slow-building sequences of the killer stalking his next victim are as bone-chilling as in any slasher flick (I wonder if many Koreans who saw this were ever able to look at a fully-grown rice paddy quite the same way again). We get a sense of the detectives’ increasing obsession with the case and the psychological toll that it takes on them. There are oh-shit moments when they realize that another attack is imminent, and clever bits of investigative work that reveal genuinely interesting new clues and insights. The standard thrills and chills of the genre are there, and undeniably effective.

In this director’s hands, it could hardly be otherwise. Chances are you’ve never heard of Bong Joon-ho, but in the film world, he’s widely considered to be one of the most talented and idiosyncratic directors working today. Memories of Murder was only his second feature, and he’s known mostly for his subsequent efforts: the soulful monster flick The Host (2006), the twist-filled thriller Mother (2009), and most recently Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), big-budget international productions that are still defined by the director’s offbeat sensibilities. But even back in 2003, he had already honed his skills and found his voice. His style is distinctive, but not so defined by certain techniques as that of some directors, even great ones. He’ll use anything: quick-cutting handheld shots or long, intricate single takes; hectic cacophonies or quiet, precise sound design; smooth dollies or artfully framed static shots in deep focus. Yet it doesn’t feel like desperation, throwing different things up on the screen to keep us interested—just a director in firm command of the medium, making judicious use of all the tools available to him.

Bong’s prodigious skills are apparent even at the surface level. With no CGI or big action set pieces, and using (as far as I can tell) no equipment more advanced than a Steadicam, he creates suspense as effectively as any Hollywood thriller. He’s fond of framing shots so that we can see some approaching danger while the subject can’t, a time-honored way to make audiences squirm. He also cuts to the true close-up noticeably less often than usual, so that when he does, we instinctively perk up and pay attention to what we’re seeing, whether it’s a character’s face or something else that we know to be significant, like a pair of boots, the hands of a mysterious figure, or (only once, at the very end) a gun. Equally effective is his use of sound design; at suspenseful moments he often makes limited use of music, instead finding the creepier dimensions of ostensibly normal sounds: pattering rain, vegetation rustling in the wind, or footsteps on pavement. Even the movie’s lone chase sequence, which features no special effects or crazy stunts (it’s really just three guys running after another guy) is still pretty exhilarating, thanks to a propulsive score and Bong’s adherence to the golden rule of action filmmaking: when you cut, don’t make the audience search around the frame for the thing they’re supposed to be focusing on.

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So that’s one level, the surface level: detectives on the hunt for a depraved killer. And yet, the movie never feels like just a murder mystery, does it? Not just a crime thriller, but…what, exactly? I can’t rightly say. It’s impossible to put a clear label on, yet somehow it’s not a thematic mess; every element has a purpose, the story moves forward with terrific momentum, and beneath the murky surface, it rings out with moral conviction.

Before getting any deeper into this, it helps to know a bit about the movie’s fascinating relationship to real events. I’m no expert on any of this, but the basic facts (imparted to me by Wikipedia, the testimony of a helpful Korean friend, and a few informative articles) are sufficient to appreciate what Bong is up to here. The movie is loosely based on a real-life serial murder case, the most famous in Korean history, in which ten women were killed in and around the city of Hwaseong in the late 1980s. Nothing like it had ever happened before in South Korea, where crime in general (at least of the non-government-atrocity variety) had always been fairly low, even in those days. There had been murders, of course, but never a high-profile serial killer with such grotesquely specific methods, seemingly lifted from a lurid crime story. And most importantly of all, as in the movie, the killer was never caught. The case has been understandably infamous ever since, comparable to that of the Zodiac killer in the United States.

The obvious mainstream analogue to Memories of Murder would be David Fincher’s 2007 Zodiac, and there are some similarities: both movies find meaning in a murder investigation that doesn’t lead to a satisfying resolution, and both re-create their respective settings with exquisite attention to detail. But whereas Fincher adheres precisely—even relentlessly—to the historical record and depicts some of the murders with almost sickening immediacy,[i] Bong’s approach is simultaneously freer and more restrained. He indulges far less in the standard gross-outs and voyeuristic shocks of the genre—to the point that we don’t actually see any of the murders in their gruesome entirety—and like the highly regarded stage play on which the movie is based, he takes enough liberties with the story to slide it into “Inspired by true events” territory. He doesn’t include all ten murders and condenses the time frame; the real Hwaseong killings occurred from 1986 to 1991, while Bong restricts the movie to a vaguely defined year or so around 1986-87. The real-life investigation also grew to absurd proportions, eventually involving over a million police officers and thousands of suspects, while Bong focuses on a smaller cast of fictional characters: the detectives Park, Seo and Cho,[ii] a few of their superiors and colleagues, and three different suspects. These adjustments make the sprawling source material more manageable, and give Bong more freedom to explore the unique social and political dimensions of the story.

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The key thing to understand is that the Hwaseong murders occurred, perhaps not coincidentally, at a particularly fraught moment in the nation’s history. The South Korea that most of us are familiar with is so hip and modern, it’s easy to forget (or, if you’re like me, not know in the first place) that until fairly recently, it was a deeply repressive state—one of your standard U.S.-backed military dictatorships of the Cold War era, holding the line in its part of the world against a Communist-aligned neighbor. There were different periods and different strongman rulers, but for ordinary people, it just meant different iterations of typical totalitarian misery. The late 1980s was the nation’s moment of rebirth, so to speak: a time of mass protests, violent crackdowns, and heightened tensions with the North—eventually leading to major reforms that set it on a path towards the liberal democracy we know today. Bong establishes this broader context clearly, but without distracting from the main story: lines of dialogue refer to unrest in nearby areas; the police chafe under pressure from protesters and newly emboldened journalists; crisis-preparation drills regularly grind life in town to a halt; and we catch a brief glimpse of riot police clashing with pro-democracy demonstrators. For the characters (and thus for us), the murder investigation is always the primary focus, yet the surrounding political turmoil is a persistent presence in the background, affecting their work at every turn.

This is the deeper level, where the movie becomes truly exceptional: the murder mystery as history lesson and political parable. It’s easy to see why Memories of Murder remains one of the most popular movies in South Korea, so profoundly (and entertainingly) does it capture the complex stew of emotions that people must feel about their country’s painful recent history.

Start with the fact that in the upheavals of the late 1980s, the police were firmly on the reactionary side of things; as Seonyong Cho writes, they were “one of the swords owned by the military dictatorship during that time, and if they wanted, it was a piece of cake for them to turn you into a criminal, or, even worse, a North Korean spy.”[iii] Our protagonists don’t quite come across like this; they don’t voice political opinions or participate in breaking up the demonstrations (except for the violent, short-fused Cho, who jumps at any opportunity to beat people up). In their sleepy backwater district, there’s little need for them to act as regime enforcers, but, inevitably, they’ve still internalized the mindset of an institution that functions that way. So when the bodies start turning up, they follow what has become their standard playbook: find a halfway plausible suspect, get a confession by any means necessary, and close the case as quickly as possible—because their top priority is not justice but stability, reassuring the public that the powers that be have things under control.

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One consequence of this is simple ineptitude, to the point that Park, a senior detective, claims he can identify criminals just by looking at them. Acting on a bit of gossip that his wife overheard, he and Cho arrest the mentally handicapped Kwang-ho and quickly wring a confession out of him, only to have it fall apart under the most basic scrutiny. And even after that fiasco, they don’t have better methods to fall back on: Park continues to insist that Korean detectives should “investigate with their feet” and is soon consulting fortune-tellers, pushing fanciful theories about hairless killers, and generally bending the facts into knots to conform to his latest instincts. But it’s not just a matter of a few bad detectives—having operated this way for so long, the police force as a whole is woefully ill equipped to handle a crime of this caliber. Their records are sloppy. Their cars are constantly breaking down. They still don’t have forensic technology that has long been available elsewhere. Bong establishes the sorry state of things early on when Park arrives at a murder site, and in the course of a hilarious two-minute shot, we see children run freely past the corpse, a key piece of evidence ruined just after it’s discovered, and not one, but two police colleagues literally tumble onto the crime scene.

And yet, the problem runs even deeper than police incompetence. If it were that simple, then it would be fixed by the arrival of Detective Seo and his more modern investigative methods. Indeed, that would be a typical detective-movie storyline: sophisticated city cop is sent out to the boondocks and butts heads with the provincial locals, then they overcome their differences and work together to catch the killer. And for a long time, Bong seems to be adhering to it; in a less common but still familiar plot point, the investigation also gets a new leader in Sergeant Shin, who’s a marked improvement over his blustering predecessor. The new arrivals do lead to some progress, but this time, it isn’t enough. And as Bong makes clear again and again, that’s just the most visible symptom of a much broader and more insidious societal pathology. Gradually, in snippets of dialogue and quick throwaway moments, he establishes this crucial part of the historical context: The police are overmatched, but in the end, it’s the overall state of civic society, corrupted and weakened by decades of autocratic rule, that prevents the killer from being caught. The same shoddiness that we see in the police department also shows up in hospitals and factories, restaurants and farms, schools and radio stations—all hindering the investigation still further. Another factor is the prevalence of a typically antiquated attitude towards women; the lone female officer, Kwi-ok, is treated mostly as a sort of secretary/clerk—only through an explicit line of dialogue do we learn that she’s actually a detective, too. And, naturally, she winds up being instrumental in most of the major breakthroughs. And then there’s the simple, generalized threat of violence, the dual dangers of war with the North and oppression at home engendering a subtle but inescapable atmosphere of anxiety and suspicion. In perhaps Bong’s most brilliantly symbolic shot, we see the killer preparing to do his gruesome deeds on a forested hill, while in the village below, the lights go out in accordance with yet another civil defense drill. As Bilge Elbiri writes, “It’s as if a nation in fear is turning its back on those who are most vulnerable.”[iv]

Still, this is still a murder mystery first and foremost, and the rot at the core of society is still most vividly expressed in the police. It’s not just their brutality and skewed priorities; even more damaging to the investigation is the resultant erosion of their standing in the community. (Indeed, by humanizing them at all, Bong is actually more sympathetic than most modern directors in his portrayal of the police of that era.) Everybody knows how they operate—it’s one of those open secrets of an authoritarian world, widely recognized but rarely expressed out loud. As a result, no one willfully cooperates with the detectives, understandably wary of becoming the latest scapegoat. People regard them with a barely disguised mixture of fear and contempt, and greet their repeated failure to catch the killer with a sort of sardonic resignation.[v] One of the tragic ironies of the story is that even in a time of violent political turmoil, for once, everyone wants the same thing. However they may feel about the authorities, citizens want the police to protect them from sexually deviant serial killers, at the very least. And in this case, the police want justice just as badly, recognizing the straightforward monstrousness of the crime (not to mention the fact that, with its ghastly and unmistakable calling card, it can’t be scapegoated away). But in a state built on fear and repression, they’re unable do the right thing even when they want to; in one instance, the detectives finally manage to get one step ahead of the killer, but can’t act on it because all their reinforcements are off roughing up protestors. Such scenes speak volumes about the cost of authoritarianism, and the features of it still depressingly present in our freer societies today: corruption, lack of accountability, lies and oppression. The far-off regime of the dictator Chun Doo-hwan is never mentioned, but it doesn’t need to be; the point is that when a public institution is working for anything other than the public good, innocent people suffer. And in the end, so do those who uphold the system; for our characters, even more maddening than their inability to catch the killer is an inexpressible feeling that they should be able to, that in a properly functioning society, they might have—and it visibly eats at them, until, as Manohla Dargis writes, “finally…it becomes impossible not to see these impotent and crushingly overwhelmed civil servants as victims of a kind.”[vi]

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The remarkable thing about Memories of Murder is way that Bong’s direction and craft also reinforce these deeper themes; even as the movie hits typical narrative beats of the genre, there’s also a sense that with each one, the truth is slipping further away. Bong does this in creative and interesting ways, with a cumulative effect that gives the movie a distinctly different vibe from others like it. As in many fact-based procedurals, we begin on a specific date—October 23, 1986—but then we get no further information, and quickly lose our temporal bearings; there’s just a vague sense of lots of time passing with very little progress. There’s also an uneven but inexorable progression from light to darkness: it’s often sunny at the beginning, but as the story goes on, more and more of the action takes place at night, and even the daytime scenes are more muted, with the sun low in the sky or covered by clouds—so that when return to the bright and sunny fields for the epilogue, it feels like a significant shift. Another important element is Taro Iwashiro’s musical score, one of the very best I’ve ever heard. As the story demands, the music is suspenseful and propulsive, even wistful at times, but underlying it all are notes of mournfulness and melancholy that remind us of the suffering involved—and cast some subconscious doubt on our expectations of how it will end.

My favorite of these is a gradual shift in Bong’s images of roads. At the beginning, Park approaches the crime scene on a dirt lane that runs straight across open farmland, its course clear and easily discernible. When we first meet Seo soon afterwards, he’s walking along a similarly straight farm road. But as the story progresses, the various pathways become less clear-cut, more evocative of doubt and confusion. Our first glimpse of Sergeant Shin is also on a street, but it’s not completely straight, and the depth of field is compressed so that he and everything to his front and rear seem unnaturally close together, almost overlapping. We return twice to a quiet country road that curves gently out of sight, hemmed in on either side by steep embankments. The chase midway through the movie runs through narrow, intersecting alleys where we quickly lose our sense of direction. Later on, Bong includes a shot from a car’s rear window with the winding roadway unspooling behind us, unable to see what’s approaching. And in the stunning final shot before the epilogue, our protagonists appear as far-off silhouettes at the mouth of a railway tunnel, looking down the tracks that bend away into darkness. It’s a perfect visual representation of where they’ve ended up: diminished by their efforts and still totally in the dark, farther from the truth than ever.

It’s not just to sow doubt about the plot, either; Bong throws curveballs all over the place, keeping us constantly off-balance and slightly uncertain. He’ll sometimes throw in an intentionally jarring transition—cutting straight from a decomposed body to sizzling meat on a restaurant barbecue, for example. Occasionally, he’ll have something come totally out of left field, as when the passed-out, previously unnoticed Shin rises up and vomits in the middle of a drunken argument, or when the detectives do their flying-kick move on unsuspecting people, or when Kwang-ho comes tumbling out of a cupboard where he’s been napping. The effect isn’t always comedic; that gruesome thing the killer does with a peach is made even more disturbing by its apparent randomness (the peach never comes up again and we never learn why he chose it). And I like to think Bong (at least partly) had squeamish Western audiences in mind when he chose to stage a conversation between Park and his wife in the midst of some cringe-inducing deep ear cleaning.

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Nor is it just isolated moments; seemingly safe assumptions often end up confounded much farther down the line. Kwang-ho, for example, starts out as a classic opening-act dead end: an innocent, unlucky guy who barely escapes a wrongful conviction. But then he turns out to be very important in a different way, with tragically higher consequences. Similarly, an outlandish story about a madman living under an outhouse initially seems like typical schoolgirl gossip, until it comes up again later on and leads to a crucial discovery. Meanwhile, the fact that the murdered women all wore red seems highly significant, but then it fades away and doesn’t end up figuring in any of the breakthroughs. And the one time that something like justice is served, it comes indirectly, against the wrongdoer we least expect: Detective Cho, and it’s a medieval sort of justice that most people wouldn’t wish on anybody—leading to the emotion-scrambling moment when Park gazes almost wistfully at the combat boots his friend once used to beat suspects. This stuff helps to maintain tension, of course, keeping us skittish and off-balance, but I think Bong is also trying to evoke some small approximation of how it feels to live in a repressive society, where nothing is as it should be, certain basic truths can’t be expressed, and the very nature of reality is constantly disputed.[vii]

Closely intertwined with all this is the movie’s distinctively offbeat sense of humor. What you do and don’t find funny is subjective, obviously, but the humor here is noticeably unusual. A traditional murder mystery might include scattered moments of levity, just enough to keep the movie from getting too heavy. They take two forms, each with a clear intended effect on the audience: bits of witty banter between detectives (“They’re so cool and/or jaded, death doesn’t even faze them!”) or eccentricities in the people they question (“Hmm, this guy’s a weirdo… maybe he’s also a murderer!”). Bong does something different in Memories of Murder; the humor generally doesn’t come via one-liners or quirky witnesses, and it’s prevalent enough to be a defining element of the movie. And yet it doesn’t feel callous or forced, either, because it arises organically, rooted in natural aspects of the story. The farcical incompetence of the police, the surreal political environment, the ways life is warped in an authoritarian world—there’s an element of absurdity in all this stuff, terrible as it is, and the movie gets considerable comic mileage out of it.[viii] This gives us the requisite break from the doom and gloom of a serial murder case, but if that were all Bong was doing, the movie wouldn’t be nearly so powerful. He leans into the comedic moments, but he never loses sight of their consequences; every joke has aftershocks that are deadly serious. We laugh at that single take through the crime scene, or at Park fumbling his way through a presentation like an ill-prepared high-school student, or at him and Cho coaching suspects through their confessions with escalating exasperation, but it’s an uneasy, catch-in-your-throat sort of laughter, because we know that none of this is getting them any closer to the killer. Even moments of pure comedy, like when Park expounds his hairless-killer theory and we cut to him in the public baths, not-so-surreptitiously checking out the naked men around him, can’t escape this cloud—we know it’s just more wasted time and effort. And Bong never goes too long without returning to the end result: another innocent woman who had her life cut short amid the worst kind of horror, each landing with more force than the last, until by the final half-hour, there’s nothing to laugh at anymore. Fittingly, the escalating gravity of the situation is reflected in the movie’s clearest running gag: those flying kicks. First, Park does it to Seo in a misunderstanding that’s counterproductive, but gets cleared up fairly quickly. The second time, Cho subdues a suspect who seems credible, but ends up being a much more time-consuming dead end. The last one, where Cho simply loses his temper, is probably the funniest, but it’s also the most damaging, literally plunging them into darkness right when they seem to be getting somewhere.

As is probably painfully clear by now, there’s a ton going on in Memories of Murder, but none of it would work without such compelling characters holding it all together. Another distinctive aspect of Bong’s craft is worth mentioning here, something I’d call ‘efficiency of camerawork.’ That doesn’t meant he always uses the fewest cuts and camera angles possible; plenty of briskly edited scenes prove otherwise. But he is willing to use a single, carefully considered shot capture to several narrative beats within a given scene, whereas most directors, worried that we’ll get bored or miss something, would change angles for each one. Especially when two or more characters are conversing about something, Bong simply places them all in the frame and lets them talk (or stay silent), allowing us to observe the behavior of the group as well as the individuals. This seemingly restrictive technique actually allows him to enrich the scene in unique ways; among other things, he uses small background details, the positioning of the actors, and occasionally subtle camera movements to develop themes and character dynamics more fully. When Shin wakes up and vomits, for example, it visually demonstrates how he forces his bickering subordinates to focus on what really matters; as Tony Zhou puts it, he “…literally provides the moral center of the frame.”[ix] Staging scenes in this way also lets Bong include valuable bits of characterization that would seem superfluous if given their own cut, like Seo complaining to a waitress about his noodles, or Cho subtly telegraphing the sincerity of his feelings for Kwi-ok, or Park having a whole mini-argument with a food delivery guy over a receipt.

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Most importantly, though, Bong has the eager collaboration of his actors, mostly unknown in the West but all immensely talented. A quick note on the language barrier: Korean obviously doesn’t sound much like English, but the two share the key characteristic of being non-tonal—as opposed to Chinese, for example, in which intonation changes meaning. So even though the words are totally unfamiliar, I find that the vocal rhythms and inflections (such crucial aspects of a dramatic performance) register with surprisingly clarity.

Anyway, Bong and his actors rise to a great challenge, navigating significant tonal shifts within a pretty narrowly focused story and laying out the weighty underlying ideas in concrete, human terms—without drifting off into abstract symbolism. The characters are all technically fictional, but the moral implications of this fact-based story are manifested in them, all the more powerfully because they’re personalities we can recognize and relate to. Kwang-ho has an important role in the plot, but Park No-shik makes him memorable in other ways, as a colorful supporting player and occasional source of Bong’s trademark uncomfortable humor—as well as a tragic example of this repressive society’s failure to protect its most vulnerable citizens. We’ve mentioned how Kwi-ok’s character highlights the society marginalization of women, but as played by Go Seo-hee, she’s not a helpless victim of the patriarchy, quietly demonstrating a keen intelligence and making herself indispensable to the investigation. Even Park Hae-il’s brief, enigmatic performance as the final suspect has thematic significance: his chilly reticence could be that of a twisted killer, but given the reputation of the police, it could just as easily be an understandable act of defiance. One of my favorites is Song Jae-ho as Sergeant Shin; with his diminutive stature and haggard demeanor, he’s every inch the worn-out career functionary, but also a quietly capable leader who’s managed to retain some sense of basic decency even after many years of serving an authoritarian regime. Detective Cho, meanwhile, is a vivid embodiment of the way such a state encourages and relies upon cruelty and violence, but Kim Roi-ha makes him more than a simple brute; we see the loneliness and insecurity beneath the thuggish exterior, and his arc demonstrates how alienating and ultimately self-destructive that situation is. And then there’s Seo, who seems on paper like the corrective to all this corruption and injustice: college-educated, trained in the big city, and fully committed to more legitimate investigative techniques imported from the developed world. In fact, he’s more complicated than that, and ultimately more interesting. As portrayed by Kim Sang-kyung, he’s an astute detective, but also a bit of a sourpuss; upon seeing how his new colleagues operate, he quickly writes them off as backward bumpkins and sets out to solve the case more or less on his own, making little effort to bring them around to his way of thinking. He comes to represent the danger, in a repressive society, of trying to reform the present without acknowledging and dealing with the trauma of the past; as his more enlightened methods keep failing to stop the killer, he grows increasingly desperate and unhinged, soon falling back on the same vicious tactics he once disdained.[x]

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These performances are all captivating and thematically vital, but the cast doesn’t quite function as an ensemble. We have a clear protagonist: Detective Park, the moral and emotional foundation of the movie. Which is kind of remarkable; how does this swaggering, often casually brutal buffoon—a seeming poster boy for everything wrong with the police force—become the closest thing this movie has to a hero? It works because of a compelling character arc and a fantastic performance by Song Kang-ho, one of the all-time great Korean actors. There are only scattered bits of dialogue about Park’s past, but Song indicates a whole life story: a kid who grew up in this quiet town and never ventured too far afield, who married his teenage sweetheart and joined the police mostly so he can enjoy a bit of authority, hang out with his best friend all day, and avoid the strenuous monotony of the only other options available to someone like him—not terribly bright, but possessed of some genuine street smarts and an infectious self-confidence. With his wisecracking asides and roguish charisma, he somehow comes across as an alright guy even when he’s doing things that are cruel, counterproductive, or both.

More importantly, though, we’re drawn to Park because his basic decency is reinforced by his growth over the course of the movie. At the outset, he’s a goon who truly believes, at least on some level, that he’s doing a public service by extracting confessions and determining guilt by instinct alone. But as the bodies pile up, Park’s inner journey is that of a man gradually waking up to the weight of his responsibility, and realizing just how badly he’s been failing in it. Beneath the cocksure exterior, Song brilliantly portrays the stages of that transformation: Park’s initial refusal to let go of his old convictions, even as they’re repeatedly proven wrong; his subtly increasing horror at each body that turns up; a quiet sense of desperation, when they arrest the second suspect, to just convict somebody in the hope that the killing will stop; the critical moment with the peach, driving home the magnitude of this evil and how overmatched he is against it; and at last, in the closest thing the movie has to a climax, Park looking into the eyes of a suspect like he’s been doing his whole career and finally admitting (in one of the best-delivered lines I’ve ever heard in a foreign language): “Fuck, I don’t know.” He cut corners, cleared cases the easy way, and maybe justice wasn’t always served, but they had order and stability and it was all fine—until, suddenly, it wasn’t, and people suffered because they weren’t ready. Park is the sole character whose arc reflects the right way for a repressive society to begin to heal: he recognizes the harm that corruption always leads to in the end, and acknowledges his role in it.

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And of course, we can’t discuss this movie or Song’s performance without mentioning the epilogue, simultaneously one of the creepiest and most moving endings I’ve ever seen. It’s 2003 (the present day when the movie was released), and Park, no longer a police officer, finds himself back at the first murder scene. A little girl tells him she saw another man there some time ago—the killer, returning to the scene of the crime as they so often do—and that he looked completely ordinary.[xi] It’s a chilling moment, made even more so by the muted horror in Song’s delivery and that rustling vegetation that Bong uses so well, but what comes next is shocking: for a few seconds before the fade-out, Park turns and looks directly into the camera. It’s an audacious move by Bong, but Song performs it beautifully, and it’s the perfect way to end the movie, with several powerful messages working in tandem. First, it makes us relate to Park on a whole new level, with such a raw, unfiltered window into the pain, guilt, and despair still roiling within this outwardly affable guy years after the murders. But Park also looks directly at us, and I think that’s Bong trying to send the audience a message, specifically aimed at those in Korea but applicable to everyone: We’re part of this, too. It wasn’t just the police who couldn’t catch the killer; it was the whole society, and it’s on all of us to make sure this never happens again.

And there’s another layer to this moment, the most unsettling and, in a way, the most powerful. The killer was never caught, but given his obvious sociopathy and the way he taunted the police, Bong felt certain that if he was still alive in 2003, he would watch this movie. So when Park looks into the camera, in one instance, he was looking at the real-life killer. The message to him is simple, and, at this point, all there really is left to say: We still see you. We let you get away, and that hurts. But you never know. We haven’t forgotten, and we’re still looking. ◊

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[i] This is the only real reason why Zodiac isn’t on my List. If you don’t mind that sort of suspense, then by all means watch it—in every other respect, it’s incredibly well done.

[ii] Note that, as is often the case with Romanized Korean names, the spelling is not always consistent. Depending on which version you watch, the subtitles might spell Seo as ‘Suh’, Cho as ‘Jo’, Park as ‘Pak’ or ‘Bak’, and their female colleague Kwi-ok as ‘Gui-ok’. I’m just going by the spellings on IMDB and Wikipedia.

[iii] This article is very interesting, both as a review of the movie and as a helpful primer on the history it depicts: https://www.rogerebert.com/far-flung-correspondents/a-south-korean-zodiac

[iv] Another very good review: https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/08/15/nobodys-innocent-and-everybodys-a-victim-bong-joon-hos-memories-of-murder-returns/

[v] Come to think of it, this movie could really be quite illuminating for anyone trying to understand the fraught relationship between the police and marginalized communities in our own country.

[vi] Another very good review: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/movies/unprepared-and-illequipped-for-a-serial-killer-at-large.html

[vii] Sound uncomfortably familiar? In the sixteen years since its release, this movie has never been more relevant to us in the U.S., and indeed throughout the Western world.

[viii] I’m told that most of the actors also employ an accent particular to the southern countryside, and widely regarded elsewhere as an improper, lower-class way of speaking. Impossible for non-Korean speakers to notice, but interesting to consider.

[ix] I’ve just scratched the surface here, but for a really excellent explanation of the way Bong uses this ‘ensemble staging’ check out this video essay on Zhou and Tyler Ramos’ superb (and sadly discontinued) YouTube channel, Every Frame a Painting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4seDVfgwOg

[x] Kim apparently went so far as to deprive himself of sufficient food and sleep throughout the production in order to make Seo’s regression more convincing.

[xi] I don’t think it’s a coincidence, by the way, that the first and last scenes show Park with young children: living embodiments of what’s at stake if the conditions that let this story happen are allowed to continue.