Film review | Kōji Shiraishi | Japan–South Korea, 2014 | 86 minutes
There is something about an abandoned flat that makes a threat feel more believable than any haunted house. The walls are stained, the furniture has gone, and the sort of person who might once have lived there seems to have disappeared without leaving much of a trace. Nobody has bothered to make the place frightening. It just is. Somewhere in that drab, neglected space, a man is waiting for a journalist, a cameraman and, eventually, the audience he believes he deserves.
I found A Record of Sweet Murder on Tubi, among the sort of odd, half-forgotten genre films that make browsing the service rather like rummaging through a second-hand video shop. The English title caught my attention before anything else. Sweet murder sounds like a contradiction assembled by someone who has never met either word in ordinary circumstances. After watching the film, I think that contradiction is more or less the point. Kōji Shiraishi’s 2014 Japanese–South Korean production takes an unpleasant crime story and turns it into a question about grief, faith and how desperately people want their worst actions to mean something.
It is not a film I can comfortably recommend without reservations. Some of its choices are ugly in ways that go beyond being frightening, and the way it handles sexual violence left me with the usual question about whether discomfort is doing any real artistic work. But the central device is difficult to shake: an escaped killer demands an uninterrupted recording of his final acts because he needs witnesses, not merely victims. Watching becomes part of the arrangement.
A story that begins with an interview
Park Sang-joon (Yeon Je-wook) has escaped psychiatric confinement and is wanted in connection with a series of murders. He contacts Kim So-yeon (Kim Kkobbi), a journalist who knew him as a child, and offers her an exclusive interview. She arrives at an abandoned apartment building in Seoul accompanied by a Japanese cameraman, Tashiro, played by Shiraishi himself. Sang-joon is waiting, and the terms of the interview become apparent almost immediately: the camera must keep recording, and nobody is free to leave.
This is a simple, serviceable premise. The film’s real trick is making the interview sound less like a confession than a pitch. Sang-joon is not attempting to conceal his crimes. He is trying to explain why they were necessary, apparently convinced that a sufficiently complete account will persuade everyone else to accept his logic. He says a divine voice instructed him to kill 27 people at the age of 27, promising to return his dead childhood friend Go Yoon-jin to life, along with those he killed. The police believe he has murdered 18 people; Sang-joon maintains that the number is already higher and that the ritual is nearly finished.
There is a grim neatness to those numbers, the sort of precision that can make an absurd conviction sound like a plan. Once something has a total, a deadline and an expected outcome, even a monstrous act can be described in the language of tasks to be completed. Sang-joon has made a terrible private transaction with the universe. He expects everyone in that room to honour it.
The softness of certainty
Yeon Je-wook is the reason that premise has any weight. Sang-joon can be menacing and erratic, but he is also needy, almost painfully earnest. He does not behave like the self-possessed killers who dominate stylish thrillers. He pleads his case, grows impatient when he is doubted and returns obsessively to the dead girl at the centre of his story. It is easier to imagine him exhausting people than impressing them, which makes his authority over the room more disturbing.
The phrase sweet murder begins to make an uncomfortable kind of sense through his account. There is no sweetness in the killings; it exists only in his promise that they will be undone. He treats the suffering of other people as a temporary inconvenience on the way to restoration, and that is the film’s ugliest moral calculation. If he can bring the dead back, he seems to think, he will have done something good. The victims become entries in an equation rather than people whose lives cannot be used as currency.
I found this more upsetting than the threats themselves. Horror villains who enjoy cruelty are at least straightforward. Sang-joon believes he is acting out of love, and his belief provides an answer to every objection. Reasoning with somebody who has already decided that the outcome will vindicate the method is a particularly hopeless form of conversation. The soft voice is not a sign of safety. It is part of the trap.
So-yeon and the danger of remembering somebody before they changed
So-yeon is not a random reporter chasing a sensational story. She knew Sang-joon before the murders, before confinement and before his explanation hardened into religious certainty. That history gives their exchanges a quality they would otherwise lack. She wants information, certainly, but the film leaves room for the possibility that she wants to reconcile the man standing in front of her with the boy she remembers.
Kim Kkobbi plays that conflict without making the character naïve. So-yeon is frightened, and she challenges his account, but she has already crossed a dangerous threshold by agreeing to meet him. Journalists in horror films have a habit of remaining at the scene long after a sensible person would have headed for the nearest exit. Here, professional curiosity is entangled with something less rational and more recognisable: a reluctance to abandon the person somebody used to be.
That makes her position more complicated than a straightforward hostage role. Sang-joon wants her to authenticate his story. She wants him to answer for it. Both are trying to gain control over the meaning of what has happened, but only one of them has a weapon and a ritual timetable. The camera is nominally there to document an interview. In practice, it gives Sang-joon the audience he has been missing.
The man behind the camera
Shiraishi plays Tashiro, a cameraman whose instructions are simple and terrible: keep filming. Found-footage films have spent years trying to explain why their characters continue recording when everything has plainly gone wrong. Sometimes the excuse is a passion for documentary truth; sometimes the screenplay apparently assumes that someone will hold on to a camera while running from an axe. A Record of Sweet Murder makes the reason part of the coercion. Tashiro carries on because he has been threatened.
That arrangement solves a practical storytelling problem, but it also makes us uncomfortable accomplices. Tashiro is trapped into watching through a viewfinder, while I am watching safely from the other side of a screen. The film allows me to inspect expressions, movements and bits of the empty room as the threat develops. It also reminds me that I could stop looking whenever I choose. The man filming cannot, and the murderer has deliberately removed that choice.
I have spent enough years thinking about composition and visual hierarchy to appreciate how much pressure Shiraishi produces without polished images. The framing is often close and awkward. Faces move in and out of the lens, bodies obscure one another, and the room refuses to become a neatly arranged stage for the viewer’s convenience. The camera sometimes seems to be in the wrong place. That is precisely where the film wants it.
The continuous take that wasn’t quite continuous
The film is frequently described as unfolding in one continuous shot, an impression reinforced by the real-time structure. Shiraishi clarified in a contemporary interview, however, that it was not literally filmed in a single unbroken take. The production concealed its joins with fast camera movements and moments of motion blur, an approach he had developed through earlier point-of-view work. Some individual takes were still unusually long.
I find that more interesting than the mythology of a technical stunt. The editing is designed to become invisible, leaving us with the sensation of being unable to escape the duration of the scene. Most thrillers can cut away from a violent confrontation, compress the aftermath or move to a more comfortable vantage point. This one keeps dragging us back into the same shabby interior. Nobody gets to be elsewhere for very long.
Shiraishi has explained that the point-of-view and apparent real-time approach helped maintain the film’s tension. That seems right when watching it. The apartment is not a showcase for elaborate production design, nor does it need to be. Hard surfaces, cramped passages and a handful of performers do nearly all the work. Its ordinary ugliness is an asset. Somewhere, somebody once paid rent in a place rather like this.
When the room becomes too crowded
The arrival of Ryota and Tsukasa, played by Ryotaro Yonemura and Tsukasa Aoi, changes the film’s rhythm. Until then the drama revolves around an interview, with Sang-joon’s claims tested against So-yeon’s memory and disbelief. The newcomers bring another set of anxieties, and their presence pushes the story towards physical confrontation. Sang-joon can no longer control the situation simply by explaining himself.
This is also where the film begins to wobble for me. The heightened performances can feel as though they have wandered in from a louder production, and the jarring changes of tone sometimes work against the dread established earlier. Shiraishi has never been especially interested in separating serious horror from moments of bizarre comedy or grotesque excess. I understand the attraction. Still, an intentionally unstable tone is not the same as one that always lands.
The material involving sexual violence and humiliation is the hardest part to sit through. I can see the argument that it strips the situation of any comfortable distance and makes Sang-joon’s world morally intolerable. But the film’s extremity does not automatically give those scenes depth. At times I felt more aware of the filmmaker testing boundaries than of the characters caught inside them. For me, the stronger horror lies in Sang-joon’s certainty and the camera’s enforced attention, not in what the film can bear to show.
The god in the room
Shiraishi’s horror often begins with something that resembles ordinary evidence: a camera, an interview, a recording, a supposedly factual investigation. Once that language of realism has settled in, the films start allowing the impossible to intrude. With A Record of Sweet Murder, the question is whether Sang-joon’s god is entirely imaginary or whether the universe might be willing to honour his bargain. The possibility does not excuse him. If anything, it makes the moral problem much worse.
A deluded murderer is one kind of horror story. A murderer who turns out to have received accurate supernatural instructions is another. The latter threatens our expectation that the world will eventually sort cruelty from justice. The film toys with that expectation until belief itself becomes frightening. We have spent much of the running time wanting Sang-joon to be wrong, partly because he has no right to impose his conviction on anyone else, and partly because the alternative would be unbearable.
There is also something grimly recognisable in his desire to turn grief into a system. Loss rarely comes with satisfactory explanations. Sang-joon has made himself one, complete with numbers, sacrifice and the promise of reversal. He cannot accept the death that shaped his childhood, so everyone else must live inside his refusal. His hope is genuine and appalling. The film understands that those two qualities can coexist.
Who gets to call this proof?
The story came out in 2014, before the constant recording of ordinary life became quite as wearying as it is now. Watching it today, I was struck by how comfortably its central question fits a world where footage is treated as both proof and performance. Recording an incident may preserve what happened, but the act of pointing a camera also shapes what gets seen. A confession recorded for an audience is still a performance, however sincere its speaker may be.
Sang-joon needs the recording because he wants a version of his life that cannot be dismissed. He does not want to be another wanted man in a police report. He wants his murders understood as devotion, with the camera there to catch the moment the universe proves him right. So-yeon, meanwhile, is trying to recover some other story, one that might account for how a childhood friend became the man threatening her. Tashiro records what neither of them can control.
The film doesn’t always manage that conflict elegantly. Sometimes it explains too much, sometimes its performances pull in opposing directions, and sometimes its determination to be transgressive becomes wearying. Yet I kept watching, even when I disliked what I was being shown. It has an idea stronger than its rough edges: a camera can document suffering without understanding it, and a person can turn their most destructive conviction into something that sounds, to them, like love.
After the recording ends
I am not sure I liked A Record of Sweet Murder in the ordinary sense. I respected its construction, admired the two central performances and occasionally wanted Shiraishi to exercise a little more restraint. The film is inventive without being elegant, upsetting without always being insightful, and unexpectedly sad beneath all the noise. Those contradictions are probably why it lingered with me longer than several tidier horror films.
What stayed was not an image of a weapon but the sound of somebody asking to be believed. Sang-joon thinks that if enough people see what he is doing, and see how sincerely he believes in it, the record will eventually absolve him. Shiraishi makes us sit with that demand for almost the entire running time, close enough to hear it and unable to pretend it has nothing to do with us. The camera keeps recording. Whether it can tell the truth is another matter.
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