An abyss stares back at us. This is not Nietzschean hyperbole from a teenage film buff, but an almost physical realization that settles in the soul after watching Memories of Murder (살인의 추억). If Western crime films, from Seven to The Silence of the Lambs, have accustomed us to a descent into the darkness of the human psyche that culminates, despite its horror, in catharsis—the capture of the monster, the closing of the circle—Bong Joon-ho's 2003 masterpiece is the exact opposite. It is a requiem for logic, a symphonic poem of frustration, an elegy of uncertainty that leaves an open, throbbing wound that bleeds directly off the screen. The film is not a chronicle of an investigation; it is the staging of its implosion.

Set between 1986 and 1991 in rural South Korea under the oppressive military dictatorship of General Chun Doo-hwan, the film draws inspiration from the country's first documented serial murders, which took place in Hwaseong Province. But Bong's approach is anything but documentary. He orchestrates a discordant symphony, where the grotesque and the tragic dance a deadly pas de deux. On one side, we have local detective Park Doo-man (a monumental Song Kang-ho), a man who relies on instinct, petty violence, and a supposed ability to read guilt in the eyes of suspects. He is the emblem of an archaic, brutal, and hopelessly incompetent system, a provincial Don Quixote convinced he can fight the windmills of evil with a well-aimed flying kick and confessions extracted through torture. His faith in his own intuition is as rock-solid as it is ridiculous, a superstition disguised as investigative method.

On the other side, from Seoul, comes Detective Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), the embodiment of modernity and reason. He brings with him deductive logic, faith in documentary evidence, and the conviction that “documents never lie.” Seo is the agent of change, the representative of a new Korea that looks to the West (not surprisingly, the decisive DNA evidence will have to come from the United States). The clash between these two men is not just a clash of personalities, but an epistemological conflict, a war between two irreconcilable paradigms. It is the old rural world, steeped in shamanism and patriarchal violence, clashing with the new urban and scientistic world. And Bong's genius lies in demonstrating the catastrophic failure of both. Park's instinct leads him to frame innocent people, while Seo's logic crashes into a wall of chaos, bad luck, and an elusive, banal evil.

The landscape itself becomes a character, a silent and indifferent accomplice. The endless golden rice fields, drenched by incessant rain that seems to want to wash away the traces of sin, are an open-air labyrinth. They offer no hiding places, yet the killer vanishes within them. This countryside, which should be a place of bucolic idyll, is transformed into a Lovecraftian stage, a place of primordial horror where civilization is only a thin veneer. Bong Joon-ho, with the complicity of Kim Hyung-koo's photography, paints a desaturated, muddy world where colors seem to have receded in shame. The atmosphere is so thick you could cut it with a knife; it is an existential fog that envelops characters and viewers alike, a dampness that penetrates the bones and the soul.

The director's mastery lies in his almost miraculous control of tone. Memories of Murder is a work that defies easy genre labeling. You laugh, and you feel guilty for doing so. The interrogation scenes, with their “dropkicks” and improvised torture, border on slapstick comedy, almost a parody of Hong Kong films, only to plunge into the abyss of despair a moment later. This tonal schizophrenia is not a stylistic quirk, but a reflection of an absurd historical and social reality. The context is fundamental: the sirens of mock air raids interrupting the investigation, student demonstrations distracting the police, systemic brutality accepted as standard practice. The hunt for the monster is constantly sabotaged by the ineptitude of a state more interested in repressing political dissent than protecting its citizens. The investigation thus becomes an allegory of South Korea in those years: a nation in painful limbo between an authoritarian past and an uncertain democratic future, unable to look honestly in the mirror and come to terms with its demons.

If there is a literary work to which this film can be compared, it is not a novel by Thomas Harris, but rather something between Kafkaesque absurdity and the desolation of a Dostoevsky novel. The detectives are not heroes in search of the truth, but souls lost in a bureaucratic and existential labyrinth. The killer is not an evil genius à la Hannibal Lecter, but a shadow, a ghost defined only by his absence and one gruesome detail: a song, “Sad Letter,” requested on local radio before each murder. This piece of music, an element of pure pop culture, becomes a hellish litany, the soundtrack to an inscrutable evil and therefore even more terrifying.

And then there's the ending. An ending that transcends cinema to become an indictment, a question thrown into the darkness of the theater and the void of history. Years later, Park, no longer a cop but a simple salesman, returns by chance to the scene of the first crime. He meets a little girl who tells him she saw the killer shortly before, in the same spot, looking into the drain where the body was found. Park asks her what he looked like. “Normal,” she replies. “He had an ordinary face.” At this moment, the whole search for the exceptional nature of evil collapses. The monster has no recognizable face, is not “other” than us. It could be anyone. And then, in one of the most powerful and unsettling shots in cinema history, Park turns and looks straight into the camera. He stares at us.

This is not a simple wink that breaks the fourth wall. It is an epistemological fracture. Bong Joon-ho said he shot that scene thinking that the real killer, still at large at the time, might go to see the film. Song Kang-ho's gaze is therefore directed at him, the culprit. But it is also directed at us, the audience, silent accomplices to a spectacle of violence, but also representatives of the society that allowed the horror to happen and go unpunished. That gaze questions us about the nature of memory, the fragility of justice, and the impossibility of truly closing the book on the past. It tells us that even if the case has been closed, the trauma remains. Even though the real culprit was identified decades after the film's release (in one of those incredible twists of fate that only reality can write), Park's gaze retains its power. It was not a gaze to find a person, but to probe an absence, a moral void.

Memories of Murder is a film that breathes the air of its time and place, but its resonance is universal. It speaks of the collapse of all certainty, of the shipwreck of reason in the face of the irrational. It is the chronicle of a failure that becomes sublime art, a thriller that denies the satisfaction of the thriller to offer us something much more precious and disturbing: a profound meditation on human fallibility and the indelible scar that violence leaves on the fabric of a nation and on the memory of those who remain. It is cinema that offers no answers, but burns questions into our consciousness. And in that drainage ditch, in that rice paddy, in that final glance, we see not only the reflection of a killer with an ordinary face, but also our own.