One Of The Best Neo-Noir Crime Thrillers Of The 21st Century Is Streaming On Paramount Plus – SlashFilm

If you’re a fan of serial killer thrillers, one of the very best is streaming on Paramount+.

There is not a more unpredictable filmmaker working today than Bong Joon-ho. If he says he’s going to make a giant monster movie, he winds up making a comedy and a tragedy and an environmental cautionary tale all at once that has a big ol’ monster in it. If he says he’s concocted a post-apocalyptic action film set on a train, he turns the conveyance into a car-by-car commentary on classism and gives Steve Rogers a monologue about eating babies. He repeated himself just a little with “Mickey 17,” but there are only so many themes to choose from and he keeps cramming three or four into a single movie.

How does he routinely get away with this gonzo game of filmmaking (besides being naturally brilliant)? He creates wonderfully flawed, fouled-up characters who, like human beings in real life, surprise us at every turn. I will forever be amazed at Director Bong’s ability to, in “The Host,” turn a moment of profound grief into a hilarious comedic beat. There are epiphanies like this strewn throughout his movies, but the greatest work of his career thus far possesses some of the darkest surprises.

If you’ve never seen Director Bong’s 2003 masterpiece “Memories of Murder,” now is the time to remedy that — and you can do so by streaming it on Paramount+. The film centers on the investigation into a real-life series of rapes and killings that occurred during the late 1980s in the Gyeonggi Province of South Korea (the country’s first experience with a serial killer). Director Bong has never managed a more astonishing tonal tightrope act. In doing so, he pioneered the revisionist serial killer movie four years before David Fincher’s “Zodiac.”

Please do not read this as a slam on Fincher’s superb thriller, nor an insinuation that he nicked Director Bong’s idea for an epic-length serial killer movie for the American market (“Zodiac” had been an obsession for Fincher dating back to his Marin County childhood). As for Director Bong, he was both determined to approach the material with sensitivity (given that many of the families touched by this madness were still around), while still scratching an itch for the pulp detective genre.

He finds his middle ground via two remarkable performances. Song Kang-ho stars as Park Doo-man, a local detective who’s serious about his territory. So he’s not thrilled when he receives unwelcome assistance from Kim Sang-kyung’s Seo Tae-yoon, an inspector from Seoul who’s more experienced and cerebral (Kim Roy-ha is also good as Park’s partner Cho). Song and Kim work a splendid variation on the mismatched cop formula, but as their investigation draws on, and leads go cold, Park and Seo feel hollowed out. Defeated, even. This leads to a final sequence that, no hyperbole, may contain the most haunting closing shot in film history.

You already know Bong Joon-ho is the goods. If you’ve got a Paramount+ subscription, check it out (although this is a movie that deserves the full ad-free treatment). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll shriek and you’ll feel just a little bit empty.