Memories of Murder

"The worst of them will stay with you... forever."

2003 2h 11m KO

🙌

8.1

BANGER

★8.1TMDB · 4,857

CrimeDramaThriller

Synopsis

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A sadistic serial rapist and murderer of young women terrorizes a small province in 1980s South Korea. To prevent further crimes, three increasingly desperate detectives with conflicting methods race against time to unravel the violent mind of the killer in a futile effort to solve the case.

“The worst of them will stay with you... forever.”

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Cast

Song Kang-ho
Detective Park Doo-man
Kim Sang-kyung
Detective Seo Tae-yoon
Kim Roi-ha
Detective Cho Yong-koo
Song Jae-ho
Sergeant Shin Dong-chul
Byun Hee-bong
Sergeant Koo Hee-bong
Go Seo-hee
Officer Kwon Kwi-ok
Ryu Tae-ho
Jo Byung-soon
Park No-shik
Baek Kwang-ho

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Bong Joon Ho
Writers: Bong Joon Ho, Shim Sung-bo
Languages: Korean, English
Countries: South Korea

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 8

MONEY

Did you know

Shot for just $2.8M — micro-budget by Hollywood standards.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 8

MONEY

Did you know

Made its money back 9.3× over at the box office.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 8

ERA

Did you know

Released 23 years ago.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 8

WORLD

Did you know

Dialogue crosses 2 languages: Korean, English.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Bong Joon Ho, shot by Kim Hyung-koo. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Original score by Taro Iwashiro. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

7 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Editor Kim Sun-min shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.

MoodPlayr · trivia#07

8 / 8

CAST

Did you know

Song Kang-ho and Kim Sang-kyung and Kim Roi-ha carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#08

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Bong Joon Ho directs. Kim Hyung-koo behind the camera. Taro Iwashiro scores. Kim Sun-min cuts. Made its budget back several times over at the box office. Produced in South Korea. Dialogue in Korean, English.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

1Shot for just $2.8M — micro-budget by Hollywood standards.
2Made its money back 9.3× over at the box office.
3Released 23 years ago.
4Dialogue crosses 2 languages: Korean, English.
5Directed by Bong Joon Ho, shot by Kim Hyung-koo. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
6Original score by Taro Iwashiro. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.
7Editor Kim Sun-min shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
8Song Kang-ho and Kim Sang-kyung and Kim Roi-ha carry the top of the cast.
9Marketing tagline: "The worst of them will stay with you... forever.".
10IMDB entry: tt0353969 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.
11The top-rated still from this film on TMDB has 23 community votes — a signal the frame composition stuck with viewers.
12Classified under 22 themes, including "assassin", "police brutality", "rape", "corruption".
13Released under 13 different titles around the world.

The technical file

Cinematography: Kim Hyung-koo
Original score: Taro Iwashiro
Editing: Kim Sun-min
Production design: Ryu Seong-hie
Costume design: Kim Yu-seon
Makeup / hair: Shin Jae-ho
VFX supervisor: Han Tae-jung
Sound: Lee In-gyu
Runtime: 131 min · 2h 11m
Aspect ratio (typical): 1.37:1 (Academy)
Status: Released
Budget: $2,800,000
Box office: $26,000,000
Return: 929% of budget
Original language: KO
IMDB: Memories of Murder (2003)

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Bong Joon Ho

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What people are saying

Michael2022-12-28
★ 8/10
Doch eines ist sicher, alle die sich auf das koreanische Kino einlassen können werden bei „Memories of a Murder“ mit einem Film belohnt, der nachwirkt, der nach dem Abspann nicht nur ein weiterer gesehener Film ist. Man liest es vielleicht aus dieser Rezension raus, dass „Memories of a Murder“ überzeugen konnte und genau deswegen sollte auch klar sein, was Ihr nun tun solltet. Genau! Schaut Euch „Memories of a Murder“ an. Überzeugt Euch selbst davon, wie vielschichtig und spannend dieser Film ist. Fiebert selbst mit den Ermittlern mit und rätselt wer die Taten begangen hat. „Memories of a Murder“ ist sicher kein einfacher Film und auch kein „Feel Good“-Film, aber ein mehr als sehenswerter Film. [Sneakfilm.de]
CinemaSerf2023-09-03
★ 7/10
This is cracking serial killer drama from Bong Joon Ho - with some superb performances - that tracks a police investigation trying almost every technique known to man to trace a rapist/murderer who is terrorising young women (especially if it is raining and if they are wearing red). Kang-ho Song, Sang-kyung Kim and Roe-ha Kim don't exactly see eye to eye as they set about their task, adopting some scientific and not-so scientific approaches to their detection. The stylish and witty writing allows the characters to develop at a slow, but steady and interesting pace - using humour, pathos and violence - and at times it is the methods and attitudes of the police that appear under more scrutiny than the perpetrator of the crimes! Sadly, though, it does sag towards the end. The sharp pace of the writing and the intensity of the performances having reached a pretty high plateau, comes off the boil a bit and I found the ending annoyingly self-defeating: the identity of the criminal being less important to me than the collapsing integrity of those charged with his discovery. We never quite get back to that high standard of storytelling achieved in the first 90 minutes and as the quirkiness of the plot becomes more subsumed into the increasing frustrations of the investigators, the film becomes more and more a generic crime thriller losing much of its uniqueness. Certainly well worth watching, but perhaps it could have been shaved a bit to maintain the jeopardy.
badelf2026-07-07
★ 10/10
Summary: 10/10: one of the greatest crime films of the 21st century, a perfect marriage of Bong's satirical instincts and his capacity for devastating emotional truth. This is a great mystery film featuring comically inept police detectives, and it stands as one of the best Korean films of all time. (The other top contender is probably Parasite, also by Bong Joon-ho.) This is a must-see for any cinephile. The script and the direction are perfect. The story is based loosely on the Hwaseong serial murders, one of South Korea's first real serial killer cases. The crimes went unsolved for more than twenty years, a frustrating reality that Bong transforms into devastating cinema. What begins as dark comedy, bumbling rural detectives beating confessions out of innocent suspects, contaminating crime scenes, relying on shamanism and "instinct", gradually darkens into something far more despairing. Bong Joon-ho does an incredible job creating a realistic film while developing a sarcastic commentary on police incompetence. He went to great lengths to achieve realism, famously using a real sex worker in the massage parlor scene with Song Kang-ho. But the realism serves a larger purpose: as the investigation drags on, even Detective Seo from Seoul, the supposedly competent detective armed with modern forensic techniques, finally loses it. No one is immune to the frustration, the moral compromises, the slow erosion of faith in justice. Song Kang-ho is extraordinary as Detective Park Doo-man, written specifically for him by Bong. His face becomes the film's emotional center, particularly in those straight-on close-ups where Park stares into suspects' eyes trying to divine guilt or innocence through sheer force of will. The final scene, set in 2003 when the film was released, features Park breaking the fourth wall, staring directly into the camera (and by extension at the audience) searching one last time for those murderous eyes among us. This is masterful filmmaking that balances tone with surgical precision: funny until it isn't, suspenseful until suspense gives way to existential dread, a procedural that becomes a meditation on failure, both personal and systemic. The film asks what it means when justice remains forever out of reach, when killers walk among us undetected, when competence and incompetence alike prove equally powerless.