Harman Saini

One of my favorite asian movies; 'Memories of Murder' is a Korean crime drama based on a true story of the first ever serial killer in South Korea. When multiple women end up dead in a town, a detective from Seoul volunteers to help solve the case. The inability of the local police and lack of means to investigate a crime gives the psychopath killer an edge. The director beautifully uses the cinema technique of 'Ensemble staging' where the emphasis in the frame is not put on a single character but to the whole ensemble of characters working their way to the scene as an essential part of storytelling. The story is dark, perverted, violent yet comical in appropriate proportions. The ambiguous ending of the movie is discomforting and haunting because of the lack of closure of the mystery; exactly what the detectives must have gone through ( as the case is unsolved to this date). -438bh3