Bong Joon-ho’s sophomore effort, Memories of Murder (2003), received the 4K-restoration treatment this year. The release comes after two significant events in the film’s lore, one of which being the astounding success of the director’s most recent work, Parasite, and the other being the confession just one year prior from the real-life culprit whose sadistic crimes inspired the film’s story. The restoration also arrives in the year 2020—“during the most absurd of times,” as the director himself has remarked—and thus in (unfortunately) serendipitous fashion. This is because Memories of Murder speaks to the inexplicable air of chaos that has become our daily lives in a year of a global pandemic and mass social upheaval.

The film focuses on a series of murders of young women and the ensuing investigation that unfolds while simultaneously unraveling a team of detectives. When, in 1986, the bodies of two raped and mutilated women appear in a paddy field, the small city of Hwaseong, South Korea, practically erupts in a fit of paranoia and fear. No one knows exactly what they are up against (the case was South Korea’s first on record), and the result is an all-out scramble, especially on the part of our detective protagonists, who are woefully unprepared. In a brilliant long take at the film’s beginning, Bong drops us right into the middle of their frenzy. Detective Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) fumbles to quell the crowds that gather around the rural crime scene, children play near one of the dead bodies, and a farmer drives his tractor over a piece of evidence. No one has control over the situation but the director himself, who orchestrates the cacophony of characters and situations with his masterful grip on blocking, keeping everything comprehensible.

What Bong also demonstrates in this scene and many others is his penchant for uprooting audience expectations with 180 degree shifts in tone, his serious crime drama/procedural often switching gears into slapstick comedy or even harrowing tragedy. The result promotes further audience disorientation amidst the chaos, but also a many-layered viewing experience. When he deftly maneuvers his camera’s focus from a news report of a corrupt cop, to an almost cartoonish bar room brawl, then to the search for a young boy with a mental handicap, we are witnessing a director reveling in the multiplicity of a situation, finding every sorted little corner of the human experience. Life just keeps happening too much: this is our chaos.

Bong is attuned to this chaos, and seems particularly interested in what this chaos says about the social and political climate at large. All the buffoonery on the part of the detectives, for example, is a caricature of the widespread corruption in Korea’s police departments during the 1980s, which in those times received a kind of immunity from the country’s military dictatorship. Contradictions abound in Bong’s nuanced depiction of a city eating itself. It is one of the city’s routine bomb drills, meant to keep citizens safe, that shrouds everything in darkness one night and allows the film’s killer to strike again undetected. When Bong isn’t crafting a single scene like a multi-pronged puzzle toy, he is utilizing the potential in his individual shots, staging his ensemble cast within the frame in ways that subtly but brilliantly reveal their characters. See: the petty argument that erupts between Song’s Park and Kim Sang-kyung’s Seo Tae-yoon at a karaoke bar, only to be extinguishedby the two detectives’ vomiting sergeant (Song Jae-ho), who goes from inactive drunk within the scene to active idea man within a single uninterrupted shot.

Bong’s characters, of course, are the anchors within this feverish world on the brink. They express the confusion, the frustration, and the desperation that is so often our reality when we are faced with the uncontrollable. Song and Kim, in particular, give brilliantly mercurial performances as odd-couple detectives with opposing tactics who gradually begin to trade-out perspectives as their investigation wears on and wears them down. These broad transformations unfold at a more naturalistic pace when compared to the quickly shifting character dynamics found in most scenes, and this affords the film a nice balance. These transformations also illustrate the grand chaos at the heart of Bong’s work: that of not knowing.

Like in many detective stories, Memories of Murder explores the pervading existential fear of not knowing what is happening and what we are doing. This is a theme echoed across decades of filmmaking, seen especially in the film noir detective stories of the 40s that spoke to people trying to make sense of the senselessness of war. Memories of Murder, released in 2003 and focusing on “the chaos of the 80s,” as Bong has put it, can seem a little detached from our current predicaments, but its reevaluation today may just comfort those who feel a little better knowing that others are out there stuck and trying to figure it out too.

Memories of Murder is screening at select theatres in North America now, and is slated for a physical re-release by the Criterion Collection.

"Memories Of Murder" Review: A Staggering Accomplishment For Bong Joon-ho