The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Bong Joon-ho · a film · 2003 · 132 minutes · written with Shim Sung-bo, from Kim Kwang-rim’s play Come to See Me · in Korean, as Salinui chueok
Mode
Police procedural and social indictment in one, made as a genre film that refuses its solution; farce and terror braided
Mythos
The inquiry into a face; the faceless killer as a figure of the era; the culvert as a mouth in the earth looked into twice, seventeen years apart
Phase
Autumn 1986 to the following year in one farming town, from a culvert to a railway tunnel, with a coda in 2003 at the same culvert
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 132 minutes, in Korean; two detectives and their squad, three suspects in turn; Kim Hyung-koo’s photography and a spare score by Taro Iwashiro
Register
From a flying kick in a station basement and a bathhouse search to a body in the reeds in the rain; pale gold fields by day, black rain by night
Scale
A town, its police and its fields, the dictatorship’s last years around them, and one look into the lens
Governing Proposition
Two detectives, one who reads guilt in faces and one who trusts documents, hunt a killer of women through a farming town in the last years of the dictatorship, and beat, coax and threaten three suspects without finding him. The wager of the film is that a procedural which never closes can disclose a state that turns its force on its own people and cannot protect them, and that farce and terror can share every frame because the policing of the era was both.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
An autumn field in 1986, golden and still. A boy plays beside a concrete culvert at the edge of it. Detective Park Doo-man, played by Song Kang-ho, bends to look into the culvert, where a body lies, and the boy, crouching beside him, copies him. The film begins with a look into a dark mouth in the earth, and it will end with the same look.
The crime scene that follows is chaos: children running through it, reporters, and a footprint in the mud that a tractor rolls over before anyone can keep it. No one guards anything. Park’s method is his eyes; he believes he can see guilt in a face, and the field where the evidence is trampled is the whole of what that method can know. The film shows the incompetence in the frame and does not say it.
Bong Joon-ho made the film in 2003, his second feature after Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), from a screenplay written with Shim Sung-bo after Kim Kwang-rim’s stage play Come to See Me (1996). Its subject is the Hwaseong murders in rural Gyeonggi province, the first in 1986, unsolved when the film was released. Kim Hyung-koo photographed it, Kim Sun-min edited it, Ryu Seong-hie designed it and Taro Iwashiro wrote the music. Kim Sang-kyung plays Seo Tae-yoon, Kim Roe-ha plays Cho Yong-koo and Byun Hee-bong plays Sergeant Koo.
Movement II
The first suspect is Baek Kwang-ho, played by Park No-shik. Park and Cho take him to the station basement, where Cho beats him and lands a flying kick that the film plays for laughs, and a confession is shaped out of him. The comedy is real and the violence is real, and they are the same scene.
Seo Tae-yoon arrives from Seoul with a rule, “서류는 거짓말을 하지 않는다” (“Documents don’t lie”). He trusts the files where Park trusts faces. Against the man of the eyes stands the man of the documents, and for a time the film lets the viewer believe that method will find what instinct could not.
Around them the investigation goes into farce. Park searches a bathhouse for a hairless man, and a shaman’s talisman is brought into the case. These scenes are funny, and they repeat in comedy what the interrogations show. Park’s girlfriend, Seol-young, played by Jeon Mi-seon, stands at the side of the investigation.
Movement III
The killer works on rainy nights, and red clothing becomes a sign. A woman walks a dark road in the rain, and behind her, in the reeds, a hand. The film’s dread rises in these scenes from below the comedy around them, and Iwashiro’s score gives the rain a lament.
On the night of one murder the riot police are away putting down a demonstration. On another the whole town goes dark for a civil defence drill, and a killer works in the blackout. The state is present in force and absent where it is needed, and the film discloses this by what it shows rather than by what anyone says.
A man found at a murder site becomes the second suspect, and he fails them too. Cho’s violence follows him into a bar, where a fight leaves him with a wounded leg. Seo, who came to stand above the provincial squad, goes alone to a quarry in the rain, and the case begins to work on him as it has worked on them.
Movement IV
A woman officer notices that on the nights of the murders a listener has requested the same song on the radio, Yoo Jae-ha’s “Sad Letter”. The clue leads to Park Hyeon-gyu, played by Park Hae-il, a quiet young man with a face that gives nothing away. Park’s eyes can read nothing in it.
Seo had met a schoolgirl and seen the bandage on her back while she was alive. When a girl’s body is found under a tree, it is the bandage that tells him who she is. From that moment the man of documents is finished as a man of documents, and the rational method begins to turn into the violence it came to correct.
A DNA report is awaited from the United States. The film waits on the report as the police do, and the viewer, led suspect by suspect, has come to want a confession as much as they.
Movement V
At the mouth of a railway tunnel Seo holds a pistol to Hyeon-gyu’s head. The report from the United States arrives, and it does not settle what they want it to. Park looks into the young man’s face and asks him, “밥은 먹고 다니냐?” (“Are you eating?”), a question with no inquiry left in it. A train passes between the detectives and the suspect, and the case passes with it.
In 2003 Park comes back to the field and bends again to look into the culvert. A girl there has seen a man at the same place. Asked what he looked like, she says, “그냥 평범해요” (“Just ordinary”). Park turns and looks into the lens, and the film ends on his face, turned on the viewer.
In September 2019, sixteen years after the film was released, the police identified the killer by DNA: Lee Choon-jae, imprisoned since 1994 for another murder, who confessed. The face the girl called ordinary now has a name. The film did not know it and could not, and its refusal to give one reads now as a record of a time in which the men charged with finding the truth did not know how to look.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the structure and the screenplay. Much of the film is required, and more than its loose manner suggests. The prologue’s culvert is paid by the epilogue. The trampled footprint and the tractor rolling over it hold the method of the whole inquiry in one image. The radio requests for Yoo Jae-ha’s “Sad Letter”, noticed by a woman officer, become the link to the third suspect. The bandage Seo sees on a schoolgirl’s back while she lives is how he knows her body. The three suspects escalate rather than repeat. What gives, and it gives more than a little: the bathhouse search and the shaman’s talisman are comic digressions that repeat what the interrogations show, Park’s girlfriend has scenes the film could lose, and Cho’s bar fight and wounded leg are laid out longer than they need.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A state that organises its force against its own citizens cannot protect them, and the men it charges with finding the truth know only how to manufacture it. Park reads guilt in eyes and beats confessions out of suspects; Seo arrives with “서류는 거짓말을 하지 않는다” (“Documents don’t lie”) and ends with a pistol at a suspect’s head, the rational method turned to the same violence. Much is disclosed through image: on the night of a murder the riot police are away at a demonstration, and a town goes dark for a civil defence drill while a killer works. A second truth, the ordinary face of evil, is left unfound. It meets the bar of the Epochal Gate exactly: part of the period critique is given as atmosphere, and the women killed have almost no life in which the disclosure might be proved.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation here is dread, and it rises. The opening field, golden and still, with a boy beside a culvert and a body inside it. The night murder in the rain, a woman on a dark road and a hand in the reeds behind her. The blackout of the drill. The rain at the quarry with Seo alone. The tunnel, a train passing between a detective and the man he cannot prove guilty, the report in his hand settling nothing. The last shot, Song Kang-ho turning to the camera. Taro Iwashiro’s score gives the rain a lament. Held at its figure by frequency and by the film’s own manner: the comedy, part of its law, deliberately lowers the pitch through the first hour, and much of the middle is procedure played for absurdity rather than height.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The myth is built in one structure: the inquiry into a face. Park believes he can see guilt, and the film is the destruction of that belief, ending at a culvert with a girl who saw the killer and can say only that he looked ordinary, and with Park looking at us. The killer becomes the faceless one, a figure of the era rather than a man, and the final gaze puts the audience among the faces to be read. The culvert, looked into twice, seventeen years apart, carries a descent and a return. What holds it lowest of the governed axes, five tenths below the gate: around that structure much is evoked rather than built (the shaman, rain as the killer’s weather, red clothing as a sign, the field of the prologue), the detective form had carried the failed inquiry before, and the archetype of the hidden face is used with force more than deepened.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is double: the American serial-killer film of the 1990s, Se7en (1995) among it, whose killer is a mastermind and whose detectives at last see; and the Korean police and crime film, with the political cinema of the Korean New Wave behind it. The turns are real. The killer is never seen as a person and the case is not solved; the detectives are provincial, brutal and comic; slapstick and rape-murder are governed by one law in the same scenes; and the genre becomes a history of the dictatorship’s last years. The stake was a second feature after a commercial failure, on a real case with the killer at large. Held below the gate, and well below it: the unsolved inquiry was a path the art film had proved, from L’Avventura (1960) to Imamura, the open ending was given by history, and this was a studio-backed genre picture whose wager paid at once.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. A procedural that never closes is the instrument of its knowledge: the viewer is led, suspect by suspect, to want a confession as much as the police do, and is made complicit in a certainty the report at the tunnel then refuses. The tonal form is also the knowledge: farce and terror alternate because the era’s policing was both, and to remove the comedy would make the detectives villains and the film a thesis. The epilogue completes the form: the procedural’s question, who, is answered by “그냥 평범해요” (“Just ordinary”), and the camera’s last subject is the detective’s face, turned on the viewer. Held below the top because, outside the ending and the tonal braid, the grammar is the police film’s own, well used rather than remade, and the middle runs on an inherited rhythm of suspect and interrogation.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over twenty-three years, and the questions stay open: whether Hyeon-gyu was the man, which the film never says and the tunnel withholds; what the final gaze is, an accusation, a plea or an admission; how much the comedy indicts and how much it forgives. The identification of the real killer in 2019 changed how the film is watched without exhausting it: the face the girl called ordinary now has a name, and the film’s refusal to give one reads as a record of a time rather than a riddle. Formally it yields on return, in the rhymes of culvert, field and tunnel, of Park’s eyes and Seo’s documents. What holds it: twenty-three years is a short demonstration, and part of the writing on the film now runs through the director’s later reputation rather than through the film.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the film showed that a genre picture could carry a national history and a political indictment without becoming a thesis, and that comedy and atrocity could share a frame under one law; with Oldboy of the same year it set the terms of the Korean genre renaissance. It perfected a mixture more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Korean cinema it is wide and can be shown, in the police and serial-killer films of the following decade, The Chaser (2008) among them, and in the director’s own Mother (2009). Abroad the reach is mainly a standing that rose with the director’s later prizes, and it is credited as presence, not as redirection. Held three tenths below the gate.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-three years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, and nothing has been lost or revised. Presence has been continuous and is now wide: a domestic success on release, steady circulation in repertory, on television and on home video, a place in teaching, a renewed international audience after the director’s later prizes, and in 2019 the resolution of the case brought it back into the news. The surface is not fixed to its moment of making: the film is set in 1986 and dressed as period, so nothing in it dates it to 2003. Twenty-three years is a short span against centuries, but presence near the widest for a film of that span carries it to the bar of the Epochal Gate, which it meets exactly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in most departments. Kim Hyung-koo’s photography holds the autumn fields in pale gold and the town in browns, and gives the rain a black depth; the first crime scene is staged as one crowded chaos of children, reporters and a tractor, the incompetence shown in the frame rather than said. Song Kang-ho carries Park from swagger to helplessness without a seam, and Kim Sang-kyung makes Seo’s breakdown arrive from inside his control. Kim Sun-min’s cutting sets laughter against dread without signalling the turn. The charges fall on real shares of the film: Kim Roe-ha’s Cho is played as a type, the score is insistent in places, the girlfriend and the women officers are thin, and the drill and the protests are stated more than staged.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Cho’s flying kick into a suspect, played for laughs in the station basement, and the schoolgirl’s body under a tree with the bandage on her back. One law governs both: men who cannot know substitute force for knowledge, and the violence that is comic in the station is the same blindness that leaves the girl unprotected. The comedy of the bathhouse and the shaman obeys the law that breaks Seo at the tunnel. The range is wide, from slapstick to rape and murder, and the film holds it in one physics. The strain is real: in places the comedy runs on its own momentum, in the girlfriend’s scenes and some of the station business, and the epilogue’s move to 2003 is a change of register that the body of the film prepares only through the prologue.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of 132 minutes holds. The state, in the police, the riot squads, the civil defence drill and the demonstrations; the rural community, in its fields, bars and gossip; labour, in the factory, the farm and the town’s work; the natural order, in field, rain and quarry; history, in 1986 and 1987 and in the coda of 2003; and consciousness, in Park and Seo. The plot integrates them: the drill, the protests and the murders are one night’s failure. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the family is thin, Park’s girlfriend a side and Seo with none; the victims are given almost no lives; the sacred appears only as a shaman’s charm played for comedy; and consciousness belongs to the two detectives alone, with the town around them a chorus.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.5, then The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.4. A disclosure that a state turned against its citizens cannot protect them, and that its methods of knowing become violence, made through image as much as statement; a film that survives whole and widely present with nothing in its surface dated to its making; a making in which photography, cutting and two lead performances set laughter against dread; a procedural that never closes, so that the viewer is made to want the confession; and one law, force in place of knowledge, from a kick in a basement to a girl under a tree.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7: the state, the town, labour, the natural order and history are held in one structure, but the family is thin, the victims have almost no lives, the sacred is a joke, and consciousness belongs to two men. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, a myth of the face built in one structure and evoked around it, and The Swerve at 8.1, real turns on a path the art film had proved, with an open ending given by history.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.5, The Living Form at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment and The Imperishable meet the bar of 8.5 exactly, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls three tenths short, The Swerve at 8.1 four tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 98.9, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok) as released in Korea in 2003, the theatrical film of 132 minutes, in Korean, the one version known to the desk, from the culvert in the autumn field to the look into the lens: directed by Bong Joon-ho from a screenplay by Bong and Shim Sung-bo, after Kim Kwang-rim’s play Come to See Me (1996), photographed by Kim Hyung-koo, edited by Kim Sun-min, designed by Ryu Seong-hie, with music by Taro Iwashiro. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Korean film; English subtitles are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. Three short lines are quoted, each held with certainty, in Korean with the desk’s own English beside them. The identification of the real killer in 2019 post-dates the film and is weighed only on The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable. Details that could not be verified, among them the date of release, the production and distribution companies, the aspect ratio, the admissions, later restorations and re-releases, the budget, the shot counts and the timing of scenes, are not given.