10 Movies That Judged You At The End
8. Memories Of Murder
Bong Joon-ho's expertly crafted crime thriller Memories of Murder follows a detective, Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho), as he investigates a spate of murders in 1980s South Korea.
Depressingly, the crime is never solved, and the film's epilogue skips forward to 2003, where Park remains haunted by the case so many years later.
He returns to the spot where the killer's first victim was found, and a young girl informs him that she recently saw a man there reminiscing about something he'd done at the location years prior.
Assuming this person is the killer, Park asks what they look like, and the girl says that the man looked "plain" and "ordinary."
After a beat, Park turns to stare directly into the camera, calling back to his method of discerning criminal suspects throughout the film, where he would maintain eye contact with a potential perp.
Park is literally peering through the screen at us, the viewers, to determine whether we might be the one responsible.
Given that the real killing spree on which the film is based wasn't solved at the time of its release, it's an especially chilling note on which to conclude, deducing that the actual culprit could very well have watched Memories of Murder and seen Park staring him in the face.
And in fact, once killer Lee Choon-jae was finally implicated in 2019, he admitted that he had seen the film but "had no feeling or emotion" towards it.