We're going to talk Alfred Hitchcock a fair bit in this list, and we're starting with the first time he propelled a story along with a string of murders. He confessed to the crimes, but was already serving a life sentence at a prison in Busan. In 2019, over three decades after he committed murder in 1986, Lee Choon-jae, the serial killer who inspired the movie, was finally identified and charged. What follows is a powerful and grisly portrait of police corruption, brutality and incompetence, as well the dark impact of social inequality and ablism. A detective from Seoul, named Seo Tae-yoon, volunteers to help the small-town cops deal with the case, to much reluctance.

The murders continue, and it becomes horrifyingly apparent that they are dealing with a serial killer. They rely on violence and their own deeply flawed instinct (“My eyes can read people”) to identify the culprit, and it all leads them to one person: a local boy with learning difficulties, called Baek Kwang-ho. The actions undertaken at the scene are ruinously sloppy, and their interrogation techniques are even worse. The police detectives put in charge of dealing with the case (played by Kim Roi-ha and Parasite actor Song Kang-ho) are immediately overwhelmed by the shocking magnitude of the crime, as well as their own lack of experience and personal ethics. Loosely based on the real-life story of South Korea’s first serial murders and set during the military dictatorship in 1986, Bong Joon-ho’s second film begins with a shocking scene: two woman have been raped and killed in the small rural town. In fact, it often ranks amongst the best films of the past century, and is a mainstay in other directors’ all-time lists Quentin Tarantino even called it “one of the most interesting and complex movies” of the 21st century, and “a masterpiece”.

Long before Parasite won him an unexpected Academy Award, Memories of Murder was the film that shot director Bong Joon-ho to international acclaim.

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