In a small Korean province in 1986, three detectives struggle with the case of multiple young women being found raped and murdered by an unknown culprit. South Korea in 1986 under the military dictatorship: Two rural cops and a special detective from the capital investigate a series of brutal rape murder. Their crude measures become more desperate with each new corpse found. Based on a true case. Memories Of Murder is based on a true story of a south-Korean little village in which someone begins to murder young women. The Police can't catch the killer so an agent comes from Seoul to give a hand in the investigation. Soon he'll find that local police's methods are rather brutal, and that they're most interested on finding a scapegoat, someone to blame in order to ease the in tranquility of the population, than on catching the real killer (according to the real facts, they never catched the author of those crimes).<br/><br/>The script is solid as a rock, and it's been filmed in a realistic style. trying to show the facts as they happened. Maybe they should've made a shorter movie, and cut some sequences out (the scenes of the interrogations to the three different suspects are a little bit reiterative), and the ending seems a little forced to me. Anyway, Memories Of Murder is much more effective and serious than the most of nowadays' Hollywood detective films.<br/><br/>My rate: 7.5/10 A long film that grows stronger in its last hour. After some initial disappointment at what seemed a conventional city/rural conflict in police-work, I was surprised by the power of what emerges by the end– enough so that I looked through the extended cast-interviews included on the domestic DVD. Someone who likes the film will be interested in the interview with the actor playing the second suspect: the film is apparently developed from a successful Seoul stageplay, in which he played all three suspects. Fragments of videotaped stage-performance shows him with very different affect– and you realize the obsessive, haunted conclusion of the film indicates its open-case presence in South Korea's collective awareness. The script is as sloppy as Song's unkempt cop, sprinkled with intriguing ideas and imaginative details that, like the investigation, simply get lost in blind alleys.
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