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Memories of Murder (2003)

In general, South Korean culture isn't interpreted in terms of the true crime genre internationally. True crime is, regrettably, a reality all over the world. Memories of Murder (2003) may be the best known South Korean film about a crime, but the serial killer premise, and the 80s era retrospective, creates a certain sense of distortion, particularly watching that film in the present day. What about the movies that aren't so salacious, that are influenced by real stories, ripped from the headlines, without focusing on the mystique of the perpetrators, or the time period in which they lived?

My Father (2007)

Fans of Squid Game may be surprised to learn that showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk, despite now being famous for creating a largely speculative world, actually first came to prominence thanks to his nascent interest in true crime as a form of general storytelling. His first film, My Father (2007), is based on the real-life story of Aaron Bates, a Korean-American soldier who tried to find his birth family and found a father on death row, a story that had attracted significant public interest thanks to a KBS documentary from 2003. While not a true crime story in the same sense we generally understand the term in the English language, My Father derives from a parallel tradition of fictional stories being adapted from non-fictional source material.

Silenced (2011)

As a relatively sentimental film, My Father had limited penetration in the English language, and even in Korean, tends to be best remembered as an early, appropriate venue for Daniel Henney to develop his acting chops in a role that didn't require he speak Korean with an especially authentic accent. Silenced, also known as The Crucible (2011), is a better example of outright injustice on-screen, as Hwang Dong-hyuk's second feature film dealt with a sexual abuse scandal at a school for the deaf. In this case, the crime wasn't incidental to the story. The film earned plaudits as a reminder than even a modern South Korea couldn't trust that systemic abuse would be reported in a consistent manner. The Gwangju Inhwa incident on which the novel and film were based happened in 2005.

Han Gong-ju (2014)

The increased profile of Silenced was a bit of a double-edged sword, however, in that international audiences may have been more likely to see the film. But they were also more likely to see the events dramatized as being endemic to South Korean culture, rather than something that could happen anywhere. Han Gong-ju (2014) is a similar kind of story. 

Based around the real-life Miryang gang rape case, Han Gong-ju is a much more personal movie and, belated spoiler warning, isn't actually clearly about this case at all until quite some time has passed within the text itself. The title character's "troubled past" as it appears in most descriptions is just a euphemism only slowly revealed through flashbacks.

Hope (2013)

A major part of what makes South Korean true crime films compelling is that it's often not until the closing subtitles that the typical audience member realizes that they've been watching a fictionalized version of a real story at all. Hope (2013) is a similarly brutal film, even if the inciting incident happens much earlier than Han Gong-ju, that also carefully veers away from clear moralizing or melodrama. There's a reason, after all, why I cite My Father rather than Miracle in Cell No. 7 (2013) as the progenitor for this genre. Yes, Miracle in Cell No. 7 is based on a real case. But the injustice is comparably unsubtle, with its mentally deficient lead quite literally incapable of understanding the charges against him.

The true crime genre of South Korean film also has trouble traveling because such films, like My Father, can incidentally reflect poorly on potential export markets. Way Back Home (2013), for example, is quite explicitly about how an ignorant South Korean courier in 2004 was detained for years in a French prison mainly because the South Korean consulate in France was disinterested in helping her. The actual criminals, with real legal representation in France, had little trouble evading detention. The story reflects far more poorly on South Korean consulates than France but nevertheless, it's easy to see how foreign markets might bristle at a plot which suggests South Koreans can't safely travel outside of their own countries.

Innocence (2020)

The increased profile of South Korean film in the 2010s led to a decrease in the popularity of this genre, despite the box office success of many of these titles, for all these reasons. By the time we get to Innocence (2020), the possibility of such true crime stories to focus on non-partisan critiques of bureaucratic justice systems has largely evaporated. Innocence is just a whodunit. That it's based on a real-life case is incidental. Casual filmgoers could hardly be expected to watch this film about the poisoning of corrupt officials in a rural community and consider that there was potential relevance to their own lives, as was seen in Silenced, where schools in general can easily be identified as potential vectors for abuse, even if most Korean people have no reason to suspect that their own local institutions engage in such despicable practices.

The trend of true crime style storytelling, in ripped from the headlines fashion, may no longer be present in South Korean film. Although its influence is far from forgotten. The ethical quandaries naturally presented by the genre elevate Hwang Dong-hyuk's early career from the level of trivia to a fairly natural creative evolution. After all, what is the purpose of any democratic system of government, if not to move on from the horrors of the past, with a mind to seeing that they never happen again?

Written by William Schwartz
Edited by kofic