For all the critical praise the Korean director Bong Joon-Ho has earned for deconstructing genre, confounding expectation, and defying convention, his career is about as mundane as they come. His resume could be that of any wannabe filmmaker: film school leads to short films, which leads to a low-budget, critically acclaimed first feature (2000’s “Barking Dogs Never Bite”), which leads to a much more successful, slightly bigger-budget second feature (2003’s “Memories of Murder”), which leads to a special effects extravaganza that becomes the most successful film in Korean history (2006’s “The Host”). It’s like Peter Jackson’s entire career, from homemade cult flicks to “Lord of the Rings,” condensed into just three films.

In interviews, Mr. Bong says “The Host” comes not from some complicated urge to subvert audience expectations but because “I always wanted to make a movie about a monster that lives in the Han River.” What makes his movies so tasty is their propensity to push this kind of straightforward simplicity to its logical and often absurd end. “Barking Dogs Never Bite” begins as a slightly comic slice-of-life chamber drama about an unemployed university lecturer who’s being driven to distraction by the noisy dogs in his apartment complex. After declaring all-out war on his oppressors, the situation quickly spirals out of control and mushrooms into full-blown black comedy; puppies are flung from rooftops, hung from pipes, and turned into yummy stews. A lazy maintenance worker finally rises to oppose this canine carnage not out of some heroic motivation but because she wants her 15 minutes of fame on the six o’- clock news.

“Memories of Murder” is David Fincher’s “Zodiac” done three years earlier, 10 times simpler, and many times better. Based on the first reported serial killing in Korea, it tracks the 1980s murders of 10 young women in Hwaseong, a blighted industrial crudscape in the middle of nowhere. But whereas Mr. Fincher heaped mountains of information onto the audience and every scrap of forensic evidence got screen time, Mr. Bong’s detectives gather virtually no evidence at all. Stymied by the entire police force constantly being mobilized to put down protests (Korea was under military rule at the time) and armed with little more than an instamatic camera and a love of beating confessions out of suspects, the two detectives at the heart of “Memories of Murder” conduct one of the lamest investigations ever put on film. Yet their desperate attempt to impose some kind of moral order on the apparently motiveless murders is all the more moving because of how pathetically doomed it is from the start.

And it’s not just Mr. Bong’s characters who fight for lost causes. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, while “The Host” was knocking the socks off of American critics, Mr. Bong was standing outside in the cold, conducting a one-man protest against America. He’s one of the most vocal defenders of the Korean screen quota system, a protectionist law that guarantees Korean cinemas will show Korean movies 146 days of the year. This year the quota was cut back to 73 days after eight years of steady diplomatic pressure. As he held up his handwritten sign all by himself outside the Palais Lumière, Mr. Bong never seemed more like one of his own characters.