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The bleak photography seems to suggest a world where the meaning of things is washed away, drip by drip, like the colors from Bong's canvas. A gray, distant humanity, soaked by the rains that drench the corpses of raped women. A reality frayed into a thousand streams of uncertainty.
In those rains, the investigators flounder, desperately searching for an elusive serial killer.
This is the chronicle of their attempts. Not so much the story of a murderer, it tells more of the violence that can be reflected, through those who investigate, onto those subjected to the investigations. A bit like the last Clint Eastwood film, the verification of guilt is not painless at all. And if in America in 1996 violence was all about the media, in backward Korea in 1986, it was as direct and unscrupulous as a flying kick to the stomach. It's the beatings and punches from the law, which doesn’t investigate analytically but proceeds with systematic torture of the suspect at hand.
The Distortions
Bong mocks the stupidity of his detectives when he has them say: “In America they necessarily have to use ingenuity, the land there is vast... Whereas here we can investigate by moving on foot.” As if it were a geographic and spatial issue. As if acuity weren’t needed to investigate, regardless.
There’s a slew of distortions and oddities bordering on pure comedy, sanctioning the ineptitude of the detectives and their armed forces. And even the investigator from Seoul, who seems more intelligent and capable, ends up being just as obstinate. He merely uses more refined methods but shows similar violence to his suburban colleagues towards the suspect to whom he has become more “attached.”
Bitter Laughter
As in Parasite, there's a surprising capacity to borrow almost slapstick gestures in such a profoundly dramatic setting. Everything (or almost everything) has a fundamentally comedic double meaning. But of that very bitter comedy that tells of the pettiness of a nation. Something akin to Totò, to Fantozzi, which by making you laugh almost makes you cry. It draws heavily from the language of anime.
With surprising naturalness, Bong’s stories always overflow the track, adding elements of real life with healthy greed to the stringent dictates of the plot. Behind every mask, there's always a man. It's a social portrait, even when the subject wouldn’t require it. And it’s almost always imbued with a prickly humor. The ridiculous sexual escapades of the detective, the prosecutor's smelly socks, the search for the man without pubic hair, the absurd fights at the police station. Or the bar fights, the investigations hindered by children running wild in the fields, the memorable police blunders in front of journalists. By inserting comedic elements at the apex of the power chain, Bong ridicules the entire nation.
Modesty
The wild joy in displaying the incompetence of the authorities flattens and recedes in the face of horror. True pain, that of the innocent, is almost withheld, given only through brief glimpses. You can’t linger on corpses (the story the film is based on is true), it’s forbidden to sensationalize atrocities.
And so the details that lean toward comedy (the panties on the head, the peaches in the vagina) are all projected onto those investigating, isolating their inept embarrassment in front of society's perversion. But those bodies deserve respect. It is the world around them that is incapable of saving those lives.
Truth in Pieces
The investigative violence is pushed to such an extent that it becomes paradoxical. The words of the suspects no longer hold value because they are battered repetitions of the convenient truths the detectives want to hear. Nothing holds value anymore, making it difficult to distinguish between elements of true confession and others of forced empathy, in the longing to end the ordeal. The authorities build their false success, assemble it with care, and even self-celebrate.
In this world mystified by armed power, the skillful detective is the one who can distinguish a sliver of truth in the mosaic of falsities. A genuine glimmer in a gray and inaccessible scenario for those who seek true knowledge.
The viewer themselves succumbs to the utilitarian logic of the protagonists and occasionally believes they have found the culprit along with them. The one with the ugly face, the one masturbating in the woods, the one requesting a certain song on the radio. These are the shaky crutches of illogical logic that thinks it can find the killer by strolling through the countryside.
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