Parasite won the Palme d'Or and Best Picture. Memories of Murder is, by several reasonable critical arguments, the better film. Both are essential. The question of which to watch first is not arbitrary — it changes what each film does to you.
This is Watchaao's watch-order guide for Bong Joon-ho's two defining works.
The Short Answer
Start with Memories of Murder.
The argument is simple: Parasite is the more celebrated film and the more immediately accessible one. Most people will come to Bong Joon-ho through Parasite. If you have already seen Parasite and have not seen Memories of Murder, stop reading and watch it. If you have seen neither, watch Memories of Murder first.
What Memories of Murder Actually Is
Bong Joon-ho's 2003 film is based on the true story of South Korea's first serial killer investigation, conducted in the late 1980s by detectives who had no experience with this kind of crime and no forensic infrastructure to work with. It is one of the great crime films ever made.
Song Kang-ho plays Detective Park Doo-man, a rural cop who relies on instinct, intimidation, and luck — none of which are sufficient. The film is simultaneously a thriller, a black comedy, a social critique of Korean institutional dysfunction in the late military-dictatorship period, and a meditation on the impossibility of resolution. The final scene — added by Bong after the real killer was identified through DNA in 2019 — is one of cinema's most devastating single moments.
What makes it exceptional: Memories of Murder refuses to choose a tone and holds all of its tones simultaneously. A scene can be funny, horrifying, and politically pointed in the same frame. Bong's control over this tonal complexity is the clearest proof of his formal mastery. The film is not primarily about the killer. It is about what the investigation does to the investigators and the society it takes place in.
Runtime: 132 minutes.
What Parasite Actually Is
Bong's 2019 Palme d'Or winner follows a poor Korean family that infiltrates a wealthy household, one member at a time, by replacing the existing staff through calculated deception. The film is a genre thriller that shifts its genre three times.
Parasite is Bong's most formally precise film. The architecture of the Park house — with its basement and its above-ground levels — is the film's class argument made literal. The shift in the second act does not feel like a twist because the film has been building toward it through its own logic. The ending is the only honest conclusion available to a film this serious about what it is saying.
What makes it exceptional: The screenplay is engineered with a watchmaker's precision. Every element introduced in the first act returns in the third with increased weight. Song Kang-ho, twenty years after Memories of Murder, gives a performance here that rhymes with his earlier work in ways that reward viewers who know both films.
Runtime: 132 minutes.
The Core Difference
Memories of Murder is about a society that cannot produce justice. Parasite is about a society that has produced prosperity for some people by not producing it for others. The two films are parts of the same argument about class, institutional failure, and what Korea chose to become — one film made at the beginning of Bong's reputation, one made at its apex.
Watching them in chronological order — Memories first, Parasite second — means watching an artist develop the formal mastery to make his argument more precisely without losing the emotional rawness of the original.
Watchaao Verdict
Watch Memories of Murder first if you have not seen either. It is longer to process, more formally demanding, and prepares you for everything Parasite does by showing you where Bong Joon-ho learned to do it.
Watch Parasite first only if you have already started there and did not know Memories of Murder existed. Then watch Memories of Murder immediately.
Watch both in one weekend. The 132-minute runtimes are not a coincidence. The films are in conversation with each other, and the conversation is best heard when both voices are fresh.
Related Watchaao Collections
- Best Korean Thriller Movies — Memories of Murder in the context of the broader tradition it helped define.
- Best Movies With Moral Dilemmas — both films sit inside a tradition of cinema that refuses clean resolution.
- Movies You Cannot Stop Thinking About — for when the final frame of Memories of Murder stays with you for days.
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