A Record of Sweet Murder (2014)
Premise: This dude’s spent most of his life in an insane asylum after witnessing a terrible accident when he was a kid traumatized him. Now that he’s out, he’s making up for the lost time in the way these things tend to go: becoming some sort of serial killer! He calls this journalist, another childhood friend of his that also witnessed the accident, and tells her she’s in for the scoop of the century. With a tiny condition: they must meet in this delerict building in the middle of nowhere (Seul), she must bring a cameraman and the camera MUST be filming continuously. Nothing worrying about all this!
Under 90 minutes? Yeah!
Do they say the title? Nope, or at least not the version we got here.
First thing I thought of:
Okay, more: So this is another film by Koji Shiraishi, an expert in found footage that gave us the excellent Noroi, the fun even if flawed Ura Horror and uh Shirome. So yeah you gotta cross your fingers and hope for the best because he can deliver, but also sometimes he chooses not to.
In this case for example the movie is surprisingly tense for most of its runtime, confined to a single location, filmed in a (haha, okay, not really) single take, with things escalating by the minute. There’s also some really grating couple of characters that appear about halfway through and change the tone completely for way too long, and even though the movie definitely recovers and sticks the landing, it’s a pity those two are there just to… basically… shock the audience, I guess? There’s a certain very tongue in cheek dark humour going on then, but…
So,
A simple way to improve it: The cameraman is played by no other than Mr Shiraishi and yeah I think he appears way, way too little in the movie even though he’s the very rare type of camera in a found footage movie that actually does stuff (at times). So I would like if he had a more active role in the movie, thank you.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia:
References It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Yeah, and it is one of the most “why would you even bring this up right now” kind of moments in a movie full of “what the hell is that” moments.
