This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris kick off Dan week with Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 South Korean crime thriller Memories of Murder, a bleak, funny and deeply unsettling film inspired by the real Hwaseong serial murders.
The film takes us to rural South Korea in the late 1980s, where a local police squad is completely unprepared for a serial-killer investigation. The opening crime scene says it all: a body in a drainage ditch, farmers and kids wandering around, clothes being handled, evidence being trampled, and the one useful footprint destroyed by a tractor. From there, the dads follow a case built on hunches, violence, false confessions and the painful absence of proper forensic tools.
At the centre is Detective Park, played by Song Kang-ho, who believes he can spot guilt by looking into someone’s eyes. He clashes with Detective Seo from Seoul, who arrives with more method and a belief in evidence, but the longer the case goes on, the more the film shows how easily procedure can collapse into obsession. Park starts as the thug with the hunches, Seo starts as the rational outsider, and by the end those roles have become horribly unstable.
The dads dig into the police culture that Bong presents almost as black comedy: suspects beaten into saying what officers want to hear, tape recorders paused so confessions can be corrected, footprints fabricated, and vulnerable people dragged into the woods and threatened. It is often absurdly funny in the moment, but the joke curdles because the consequences are catastrophic. People are brutalised, leads are lost, evidence is ruined, and the killer keeps going.
They also talk through the killer’s ritual: rainy nights, women in red, a particular binding method, underwear over the head, and a recurring radio song request that becomes one of the investigation’s key clues. The female officer is the one who pieces together the song pattern, despite being ignored and patronised by the men around her, which makes her one of the few genuinely competent figures in the film.
As the case develops, the film keeps swerving between tension and farce. There is the traumatised survivor who remembers the killer’s soft hands, the suspect in women’s underwear who turns out to be guilty of something much less murderous but still deeply awkward, and the quiet factory worker who seems to fit too many pieces of the puzzle while still leaving the police without proof. The dads especially focus on the way Bong refuses to turn the film into a satisfying puzzle-box mystery. The point is not just who did it, but what happens when the people chasing him are violent, panicked and under-equipped.
The ending leaves a mark. Years later, Park returns to the original site and learns that an ordinary-looking man had recently visited and said he had done something there long ago. The killer, if that is who it was, looked completely normal. Park’s final stare into the camera becomes the film’s last accusation: at the killer, at the failed system, and maybe at the audience too.
Verdicts are broadly warm but mixed around the edges. Dan admires the direction and performances but does not rank it among his favourite Korean films. Cris finds the tonal shifts confusing and thinks the film is too long. Sidey thinks it drags a little and shows Bong still refining his craft, but he enjoys it and gives it a strong recommend. Everyone recognises the power of a film that turns a serial-killer story into something stranger and more troubling: a blackly comic study of incompetence, brutality and unresolved guilt.
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