MEMORIES OF MURDER
unrated, 132 mins.

In the late 1980s, as Korea emerged from a military dictatorship, a village in Gyeonggi Province played host to the country’s first serial killer. “Memories of Murder,” a smash hit in the country when it was released in 2003, tells the story of the investigation into this unsolved crime, which saw 10 women raped and murdered between 1986 and 1991. It packs all the moral outrage of a season’s worth of “Law & Order” into two sometimes funny, sometimes queasy hours.

Rural detective Park (Song Kang-Ho) believes he can identify criminals by looking into their eyes, but his little village begins to fill up with dead women and a big-city detective, Seo (Kim Sang-Kyung), is assigned to the case. Seo goes in for funny methods like gathering evidence rather than beating the tar out of suspects until they confess, but the two cops unite in the face of the implacably mounting death toll.

“Memories of Murder” constantly pulls the rug out from under the viewer, mixing scenes of Keystone Cops comedy with set pieces so tight with tension they can cut steel. Toward the end of the movie when the cops realize that not only is the killer about to kill someone close to them but that it’s too late to do anything about it, check your pulse. If it’s not racing, you might already be dead.

“Memories of Murder” will be one of the best movies to get a release this summer, and it will go practically unnoticed because it’s Korean, its distributor isn’t promoting it, and it’s only playing on one screen in New York City. But if you care about movies, get yourself down to Cinema Village and see it.