The monsters of Korean society through the cinema of Bong Joon-ho

Twenty-five years ago, long before the explosion of K-pop, K-beauty and K-dramas, the “K” was far from being a magic letter, synonymous with sophistication and modernity. South Korea seemed an enigmatic country that had the last Stalinist regime on the planet as a bellicose neighbor. Released in 2003 in French cinemas, the thriller made in Seoul “Memories of Murder”, inspired by a true story, then appeared as an unidentified object. The name of the director, for whom this was just the second film, sounded like an onomatopoeia: “Bong”. This thirty-year-old with glasses, looking like a student, depicted the hunt for a woman killer in a dark and muddy countryside in the 1980s.

The film was part of a dark period for South Korea, then under the yoke of the military dictatorship of President Chun Doo-hwan (between 1980 and 1988). Through the crimes of an elusive, almost ghostly being, Bong Joon-ho exposed the incompetence of the police of that era, inc…