Double Dose: MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003) and ZODIAC (2007)

In 1986, a small boy in South Korea emerges from a sea of tall grass and looks out to see a dirt road where a detective is on his way to a life-changing crime scene. In 1969, Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau are attacked in Vallejo, California, beginning a series of murders that will captivate journalists, police officers, and everyday citizens. Though separated across space and time, the openings of both Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder and David Fincher’s Zodiac immediately establish the tones of their movies, and try to prepare us for what lies ahead: pure uncertainty. 

Released in 2003 and 2007 respectively, Memories and Zodiac both grapple with unsolved murders. In Memories’s case, they are the first serial killings in South Korea’s history, and Zodiac dives into the murders of the Zodiac Killer across California. Both films tread through these horrific events in different ways, but with, I would argue, a similar interest: what do we do when we are faced with the ugly, messy, and incomprehensible parts of life?

Zodiac takes this question, and the questions about the identity of the Zodiac Killer, and drills them down into their grittiest, smallest components. Based off of case files and the book of the same name by Robert Graysmith, Fincher and company worked meticulously to recreate the feelings that must have permeated the air in California at the time. The atmosphere is teeming with dread, anxiety, and even a little bit of panic. The result is both extremely effective and empathetic. As we follow Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal, best mildly sinister boy next door) and detectives like Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) across years of clues, leads, and interrogations that wind through seemingly endless possibilities, we start to glean an understanding of what this kind of search does to people. Graysmith loses a marriage, Toschi loses his career, but they manage to come together to try and put the pieces together to get closer to the Zodiac. They go from strangers to meeting in the dead of night at diners to compare notes and try to find some meaning, some justice in the unimaginable horror of the crimes they fail to solve. You can feel their frustration with every wall, and their elation and hope with every lead. 

With Memories of Murder, the search for the killer is similarly in the weeds of the crimes it chronicles, but I would argue that it gives us a stronger sense of the people investigating. We spend the entirety of the movie with the detectives at the heart of it all, but where Zodiac shows us the costs of an obsession like Graysmith and Toschi’s, Memories reveals the investigators’ humanity to us through the most human thing: their failings. detectives Park Doo-man (the incomparable Song Kang-ho), Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), and Cho Yong-koo (Kim Roe-ha) desperately want to put an end to the murders of women happening around them, sometimes to disastrous results. They rush to conclusions, accuse, imprison, and torture a man who is developmentally challenged, and another man who turns out to be innocent as well. They often fumble their methods, fight amongst themselves, in bars, and latch immediately onto a suspect when a shred of evidence comes into view that fits their idea of the serial killer they’re looking for. And yet, you root for them to solve these crimes all the same. Their methods are problematic and clumsy to say the least, but it’s still heartbreaking to see them fail. When Detective Seo Tae-yoon has his unshakable faith in documents shattered by an inconclusive DNA test you feel like you, too, are standing in the rain on the railroad tracks with him, rain pouring over you, the future as dark and unknowable as the tunnel ahead of you. 

Both movies end with no real answers about who is responsible for the murders that take place. There is some sense of closure in Zodiac, when Graysmith, at long last, gets to look at the face of Arthur Leigh Allen. You can see that while the Zodiac hasn’t officially been found, Graysmith has found the answers he needs when terror and relief simultaneously wash over his face in the middle of the hardware store where Allen is working. In the iconic ending to Memories, we get a time jump to an older, now-salesman detective Park Doo-man who returns to the scene of the crime shown at the beginning of the film. He eventually turns to face the audience, searching for the killer among the viewers, still searching after all these years. These two approaches to providing closure are satisfying in their own ways. 

While the crimes of Zodiac still remain unsolved to this day, there was a breakthrough in late 2019 in the cases that Memories was based on. After this revelation, Director Bong said, “When I made the film, I was very curious, and I also thought a lot about this murderer. I wondered what he looks like...Finally last week I was able to see a photo of his face. And I think I need more time to really explain my emotions from that…” Knowing this when watching Memories for the first time made the ending all the more effective. 

Reckoning with the unknowable, messy, and ugly parts of life is never easy, even in movies where it feels like there should always be a straightforward conclusion to every situation. The beauty of both Zodiac and Memories of Murder is that they throw off that expectation and embrace the murky waters of the unknown -- diving into uncertainty headfirst. They both seem to be saying that while we may not always get the answers we need in life, even to life’s ugliest parts, we do get the chance to keep pushing forward. Zodiac and Memories of Murder remind us that this is something worth holding onto and remembering, always.