A brief argument that Memories of Murder (2003) is the greatest police procedural ever made.

The procedural genre has a conventional structure: crime is committed, investigation follows, solution is found. The pleasure of the genre is the solution — the moment when disorder becomes order and competence is vindicated.

Memories of Murder violates this contract so completely that it constitutes a different kind of film. The investigation proceeds for two hours with escalating competence and escalating failure. The solution is never found.

But what makes it the greatest rather than just the most subversive is how Bong Joon-ho handles the emotional register. This is not a bleak film. It's funny — uncomfortably, specifically funny in the way that institutional failure is funny. The detectives are incompetent and sympathetic and recognizably human.

The final shot changes everything you thought you understood about the film's tone. It's not funny anymore. It's an accusation directed at an audience that has been watching incompetence with affectionate distance for two hours. What did you do, the film asks, while the case went cold?