Memories of Murder

Bong Joon-ho’s second feature film ticks all the boxes for a police thriller, but is also a portrait of South Korea in the late eighties, when the country was making the difficult transition from military dictatorship to democracy.

During the same period, South Korea’s first official serial killer raped and murdered ten women in the rural province of Hwaesong. The police carried out no less than three thousand interviews, and the government mobilised 1.8 million officers and soldiers to help with the investigation.