A Record of Sweet Murder (2014)

Original title: Aru yasashiki satsujinsha no kiroku

Journalist Soyeon (Kim Kkobbi) is suddenly contacted by her old childhood friend Sangjoon (Yeon Je-wook). They haven’t seen each other for twenty years, ever since Sangjoon had been hospitalized in a mental institution, following some accident the film will get into eventually when they both were seven years old.

Sangjoon is out now, escaped, and has supposedly committed eighteen murders; still Soyeon agrees to meet him at a place of his choosing only accompanied by a Japanese cameraman (Koji Shiraishi playing a cameraman named Tashiro, as is his wont). Sangjoon is very insistent on the Japanese cameraman, for reasons he will explain later. When they meet up in an old, run-down apartment, Sangjoon quickly starts ranting and raving and tells an odd story: he hasn’t “only” committed eighteen murders but actually twenty-five, with two additional murders to come. He’s not killing for no reason, or so he explains. Ever since the childhood accident that killed one of his and Soyeon’s friends, God has spoken to Sangjoon, eventually convincing him that he has to murder twenty-seven people after his twenty-seventh birthday to bring their friend back from the dead. Sangjoon’s victims will apparently come back to life as well, or so God says. In his mind, Sangjoon connects all of this to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which actually will make some kind of sense later on, in a wonderfully perverse way.

Soyeon doesn’t believe Sangjoon’s story at first, of course, but further developments suggest at the very least that either something very weird is going, or the laws of causality are so broken, unpredictable things will as a matter of course happen exactly like Sangjoon predicted.

When other directors sleep, Japanese master of the highly individual and weird POV horror movie Koji Shiraishi shoots another movie, TV show, or direct to whatever thing. This is a fine example of the man’s style, not as brilliant or complicated as Noroi or Occult but still following many of the director’s thematic obsessions. These films, together with the Senritsu Kaiki series, do seem to take place in the same universe, not just because Shiraishi tends to pop up as the actual DP as well as the guy playing the camera operator in many of them, but because their cosmological and thematic elements seem so closely related. Even the design of the godhood(s) having their fun with Sangjoon belongs into the same conceptual world as those in much of Shiraishi’s other works, and A Record’s climax (which I don’t want to spoil) is very much in keeping with the later episodes of Senritsu Kaiki. Just that here, developments feel rather more serious and focussed, where the series tends to the consciously silly and eccentric.

In fact, A Record of Sweet Murder is a rather tight movie, setting up a situation, dropping a handful of characters into one room, and then letting madness, tension, and camera waving escalate. I’m pretty sure if he wanted, Shiraishi could be a successful director of mainstream thrillers and horror movies, he just chooses to be eccentric and individual; at least he’s as tight and controlled here as anyone could wish from this kind of movie. For Shiraishi, this is one of the bloodier and more exploitative movies of his career, which only irregularly dips into the nasty stuff. But even here, the ending’s not going to satisfy the more gore-minded viewer because the film takes one of those wild swings its director/writer/etc likes so much and ends on a completely different note than you’d probably expect.

A note I might have found rather annoying myself if the film hadn’t actually subtly prepared it very well throughout, and if it weren’t executed as well as it is.