The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
23. 2003 - Memories Of Murder
Honourable Mentions: Kill Bill: Vol. 1, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Over a decade before he received mainstream international acclaim with the award-winning Parasite, South Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho directed a supremely unsettling and heartrending thriller called Memories of Murder. His sophomore feature, arriving after 2000's Barking Dogs Never Bite, Memories of Murder dramatises the story of South Korea's first confirmed serial killings, through which Director Bong explores themes of a repressed national trauma, institutional failure, and the existential pain that comes when closure remains frustratingly out of reach.
It's unapologetically confrontational and self-scrutinising, anathema to generic true crime in the sense that it's less concerned with the procedural elements of detective fiction and building a mythology around its subject matter and more about the emotional cost such acts of cruelty exert on both a micro and macro level. It shares much in common with David Fincher's Zodiac, in that way, and like Zodiac, Bong's film remains one of this century's most essential.