Ten features and one omnibus film from South Korea screened at the 53rd Melbourne International Film Festival. Of these, I can’t comment on Natural City, Samaritan Girl and If You Were Me since I neglected to see them. From inquiries and overheard conversations, it seems Natural City received a warmer reaction than might have been expected, and given my tastes Samaritan Girl was probably the Kim Ki-duk I should have forced myself to watch. Unfortunately, If You Were Me was very much under my MIFF radar and I have no idea how audiences responded to it.

Memories of Murder and Old Boy were absolute standout pictures this year, which given their reputations was not a huge revelation. A little more surprising was how well they performed in light of the substantial array of excellent Asian films on offer (all the non-Miyazaki Studio Ghibli films, Nobody Knows, Tropical Malady, Breaking News, 20:30:40, Men Suddenly In Black). I’ve come away from MIFF loaded with thoughts and feelings about Memories and Old Boy, even while plenty of other pictures captured my attention (personal favs: Last Life in the Universe, South of the Clouds, Golden Swallow, My Neighbours the Yamadas). Is that a sign of their relative quality or some kind of a putative Korean-alism? I showed (forcefully ... guiltily) the Old Boy DVD to three people in three days upon returning from Melbourne, which could be an indicator of either I guess. That the hoodwinked spectators in question nodded sagely at Old Boy’s obvious merits, asked involved and detailed questions about the story (about why youthful Yu Ji-tae is cast opposite Choi Min-shik, what the deal is with all the red herrings early in the story, etc) and sat still a lot longer than I expected speaks volumes for the excitement and captivation generated by the film itself.

Memories of Murder was a thankful smash success for director Bong Joon-ho whose deftly observed Barking Dogs Never Bite failed to pack multiplexes. It seems that Korean filmmakers can get away with a single instance of box office poison, but two strikes in such a commercially inclined cinema is probably enough to fan all but the titans (such as the Kang’s Je-gyu & Woo-suk) back to the dugout. Memories is a crime thriller based on a real serial killing episode in Korea in the mid-1980s. It is as much about interrelations among the solitary female and several male detectives as it is about murder, mayhem and chasing the killer. It’s Se7en without the stupid gimmick, L.A. Confidential without the dime novel vernacular, and unlike those films doesn’t mind poking fun at its heroes and the bent system they work in. Bong never allows the story to miss a beat: routine concerns like compiling evidence, conducting excessively rigged interviews, beating on suspects, and growing to love thy comrades in detection are expertly handled to maximise clarity and impact. At some point in the always engrossing encounter we gradually realise that the whodunnit plot is being overtaken by a character study, one that shows us how the investigation is emotionally scarring the overtly masculine detectives. When push comes to flying kick in the chest, even tough guys can lose their innocence.

Old Boy is the most exciting movie I’ve seen in ages. Rialto Entertainment have scored the local release and if they handle it diligently I expect they’ll be happy with the returns. This is the one film we can safely show all those people who have abruptly ended our enthused conversations with “oh … Korean cinema, eh? I’ve never seen a Korean movie....” Safely? Well, so long as those viewers can withstand oodles of hideous oral wreakage. We knew from Sympathy for Mr Vengeance that helmer Park Chan-wook was a little preoccupied with the Cinemascope mangling of human bodies. The addition of Old Boy’s gruesome operative procedures via claw hammer to Park’s motif cache is bound to have us on our toes upon future journeys into his relentless deterministic universe. And yet he is no shameless merchant of the cheap and vulgar. Park sustains his shock-them, rock-them aesthetic with superbly envisaged, expertly configured audio symphonies and visual patternings. The music is attention grabbing, swiftly bleeding from classical to pulsating electronica across the often savagely abrupt changes of scene. Cutting rhythms likewise contrast throughout: rapid editing links with visual abstraction (chasing Escheresque memories in high school), longer takes emphasise qualities of space (the flat mural look of the corridor fight scene). Joint Security Area stamped Park as a thoughtful dramatist and meticulous storyteller; Sympathy demonstrated his darker ambitions, playing looser and betraying perhaps a smidgeon of disregard for his doting audience. With Old Boy, Park and his production team return to the emotionally taut scripting of JSA, avoid Sympathy’s downward spiral (or do they?) and deliver the coolest inconsequential fantasy since Brian DePalma’s underseen Femme Fatale. See it before it gets dated.

Of the other Korean pictures, only A Good Lawyer’s Wife will stick in my imagination for a while. The performers are gifted with intricate characters and, via evasive handheld camerawork, ample space to roam. Hwang Jeong-min and Moon So-ri as the husband and wife are held at simmering point by director Im Sang-soo, who carefully shuns blatant melodrama at crucial moments. I'd never noticed Hwang before, whose work is especially good: you can feel his internalised confusion as he tries to figure out ways of expressing all the glorious contradictions of ‘the modern lawyer’. Dialogue is incredibly exacting, sustaining momentum. Babble is eradicated, allowing the characters to compellingly open up (the mother’s farewell at the airport) or declare the final, threatening word (the lawyer’s reaction to the news of his wife’s infidelity). We’ve seen this story before, but the nuanced handling is fresh.