a review of 杀人回忆

1st Annual Criterion Challenge Week 18: Spine #1000 or higher I'd been looking forward to this re-release for a while as it was my biggest remaining blind spot in viewing Bong's filmography. I ended up getting it at a nice discount from a Blu-ray of the month club, so I figured I'd watch it for the Spine #1000+ theme. I wasn't expecting quite the full deconstruction of the murder mystery genre that we got here, especially after seeing Bong's later thriller "Mother" (which shares a number of thematic elements with "Memories") take a subtly different approach to its story. Even knowing Bong's deconstructionist impulses, it felt jarring and brutal to watch as the investigation hits one dead end after another after another, and watching the detectives slowly breaking under the strain. There's little of the humor evident in Bong's later films to ease the tension, so it's a sobering watch for sure. I've seen a lot of comparisons to "Zodiac", which tells me that I'm going to need to finally sit down and watch that movie before giving this one another spin.