01
When it comes to "Memories of Murder", everyone will praise how classic its ending is.
Song Kanghao turned his head and looked at the audience outside the screen in horror.
As if saying: The murderer is among us right now.
This shot is really shocking.
But I want to say that in comparison, the opening of the film is equally exciting.
It was a sunny afternoon, a peaceful and peaceful rural scene.
A teenager caught a locust in a rice field and put it into a transparent glass bottle. Immediately afterwards, the calm was broken, and a rotting female corpse lay down in the sewer, with a locust lying on her body.
After that, the police looked into the distance, and the same rice field was no longer peaceful.
This set of shots previewed almost the entire movie.
It tells us two things.
First, extreme events have become a daily routine in this land.
Just like not far from the corpse, a group of children are frolicking wildly.
Second, if a society is already dying, then the murderer will never be able to catch it.
Just as the boy caught a locust, but there was one on the corpse, there were more in the endless rice field.
Together, these two things form the core of "Memories of Murder".
What it really wants to tell is not just a story about the lack of truth and the escape of the real murderer, but the soil that created the murderer.
02
The film is adapted from the serial murders that occurred in South Korea from 1986 to 1991.
The three police officers in the film tried their best to investigate this case. They locked the target again and again, and again and again misidentified the murderer, until the final tragic end.
The film truly restored their lives for us, and did not shy away from their incompetence and barbarism in the process of handling the case.
Agent Park is a typical police officer in a small place .
He firmly believes that he has a pair of insights and can recognize the murderer at a glance.
Every time the suspect was caught, without saying anything, he and his partner Detective Cao had a torture to extract a confession to force the suspect to prove himself guilty.
After repeated frustrations, he even went to Daxian'er for fortune-telling and asked what the murderer looked like.
Compared with him, Agent Su, who came from Seoul, had a much smarter technique.
At the very least, he has basic common sense of criminal investigation and knows how to use evidence for arrest and conviction.
After he arrived in the small town, it was like a clear stream that instantly brought hope to the detection of the case.
But in the end, to everyone's surprise, after experiencing repeated setbacks, the upright and law-abiding Agent Su turned out to be even more extreme than Agent Park.
He even said directly: "You don't need evidence to handle a case, you only need a confession."
That was what he had done in the past, but at this moment, it was conclusive.
What caused Agent Su's overall "blackening"?
This is the key to interpreting this movie.
On the surface, Agent Su was dragged down by this unsolvable case.
He once thought that the truth could be obtained by logic and diligence. He has indeed made progress and inferred the murderer's law of committing crimes: always on rainy nights, accompanied by the melody of "Sad Love Songs" on the radio, specifically targeting women in red to attack.
Despite this, he still failed to prevent the next case from happening.
When the same rainy night came and the murderer was about to commit the crime again, he asked his superiors to mobilize more police, but the reply was: " All police have been transferred to suppress the student movement. "
So the tragedy inevitably staged again, and a young girl was murdered.
This has also become the direct cause of Agent Su's madness.
At this point, we can continue to dive into this movie.
Behind the cause of Agent Su's blackening, there is actually a huge black hole hidden.
It is this black hole that has caused all tragedies, including the police, the victim, and of course the murderer.
What is it?
03
If you look closely at "Memories of Murder", you will find that the film is clearly talking about hunting down the murderer, but it actually depicts the social atmosphere of Korea in the 1980s in secret.
There is a terrible environment there.
Under the rule of the military government, there were frequent social resistance movements. Parade, suppression, there will never be peace.
Under the nest, everyone is in danger.
This is an uneasy background.
On top of this, there were endless " war-defense exercises " and " refuge exercises " under the background of the Cold War , which further aggravated people's sense of insecurity.
There is also a " light control ", in order to prevent the enemy's sneak attack at night, all lights in the city must be turned off.
It is a kind of "man-made darkness" that provides invisible shelter for the murderer.
Look in more detail.
South Korean rural society has strong folk customs.
The children played around the corpse, and the crime scene was repeatedly vandalized.
As the police officers ran to suppress the movement, the local police force was insufficient and the pressure to handle the case was heavy, and the police officers had to arrest people indiscriminately.
Coupled with the backwardness of the entire country and backward technology, DNA testing has to be sent to the United States.
Adding up all of this is the black hole. It covers everything and blackens everything.
From this you can understand why this land is so hostile and why the real murderer can hide.
Just like the turbulent wheat field continuously presented by the lens, it is a true portrayal of society: it is perilous and difficult to guess.
It is silently telling a cruel truth: if a society is sick, whoever has a convulsion first is actually a random event.
It can happen at any time, or it can happen to any inconspicuous person.
As at the end of the film, Agent Park asked the little girl who had witnessed the real murderer: "What does that person look like?"
The little girl said lightly: "It's just normal. "
This is where "Memories of Murder" is really awesome.
It is not about "people" killing people, but how a turbulent "society" kills people.
Such a society will inevitably give birth to abnormal killers.
Furthermore, if "society" is the real culprit, "people" have become the scapegoat.
04
Finally, briefly talk about the latest news: The murderer prototype of "Memories of Murder" was finally confirmed after a lapse of 30 years.
This is definitely good news.
Many people said: "The "Memories of Murder" finally ushered in the finale. "
In this regard, I would like to say that if you just think of this film as a story of the real murderer's escape, you are right to think so.
But this movie is not that simple.
"Memories of Murder" is actually a documentary.
It records a piece of history, a memory of "social murder".
It reminds everyone that there was a time when humans lived so absurdly.
In the future, we will never live like that again.
And this kind of reminder should never end.
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