MEMORIES OF A MURDERER ANALYSIS SERIAL
MEMORIES OF A MURDERER ANALYSIS DRIVER

When Kim forgets who his daughter is, he tries to strangle her. The narrative plays some neat tricks on the audience.

MEMORIES OF A MURDERER ANALYSIS DRIVER

Min’s behaviour is certainly suspect: he claims the leaking body is that of a deer he hit and he won’t give Kim his driver details for insurance purposes, even though Kim insists it was his Kim’s fault and will happily pay for any repairs.

MEMORIES OF A MURDERER ANALYSIS SERIAL

He then finds himself face to face with the unhurt Min Tae-joo (Kim Nam-gil) and immediately knows that this man is like himself: another serial killer. Then, driving his black jeep, he runs into the back of a white car and, whilst going to check that the other driver is ok, finds blood leaking from the white car’s boot and takes a sample of it using some tissue paper. And he recalls his violent car accident 17 years earlier which is where all his memory problems started. So Kim spends time pondering his life at Bamboo Grave, the rural site well away from the city in which he resides and where he claims to have buried his victims. This is not a man upon whose memory, short or long term, we can rely.

And there are flashbacks to things in his past which have got jumbled up inside his head and may in fact misrepresent his true personal history. But there’s at least one point in the narrative where you wonder momentarily if these memories are actually true and whether he really is a serial killer at all. As Kim sees it, he’s preventing pain and possibly murder being inflicted on other people by killing his chosen victims. His first victim was his father who horribly abused his own wife and family, his second a woman who came to his veterinary practice wanting him to cut open the pet dog she’d killed to extract the jewellery it had swallowed. As he tells it, he only ever killed for a good reason, only people who deserved to die. For example, a flashback early on has the ageing Kim recall his many murders. Unlike Memento, Memoir of a Murderer‘s dramatic structure is not rigorously ordered and indeed can be quite disorientating and confusing at times. Like Memento, Memoir of a Murderer takes place in the subjective experience of a memory-unreliable protagonist.

Doting daughter Eun-hee (Kim Seol-hyun) gives him a mobile phone on which he can record messages with his voice as a means of recording important events in his recent past. Just as the protagonist of Memento suffers from short term memory loss and must therefore physically record events so as to have a record of them to which he can refer before taking appropriate action, so too Alzheimer’s sufferer Kim needs a means of recording events so that he can recall them by some method other than his increasingly unreliable memory. They’re plugging into a long cinematic tradition of films dealing with impossible memory and that peculiar subset thereof most notably represented by Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) in which a main character suffers from amnesia or memory loss. That’s indicative of some of the games screenwriter Hwang Jo-yoon (co-screenwriter of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, 2003) and director Won Shin-yun want to play with their audience. But it’s not clear at the start that this is a flashback, and it’s no clearer at the end when this scene recurs. In the manner of frame stories or flashbacks in so many films, we return to this sequence towards the end. It’s undeniably a visually striking and arresting starting point. Like so much in this convoluted South Korean thriller, that might be highly significant or symbolic, a metaphor, a journey, a state of mind. At the start of Memoir of a Murderer, Kim Byung-su (Sul Kyoung-gu) walks dazedly out of a dark tunnel into a white, wintry landscape.

Memories of a murderer analysis