Memoir of a Murderer · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the notebooks. Byung-soo writes everything down because the machine that would otherwise hold it is failing — a retired serial killer with advancing Alzheimer's, keeping a paper archive so the man he was doesn't drain out of the man he is. The notebooks are the title made into an object you can hold: a memoir, an evidence file, a confession he has to reread every morning just to recover his own name. And this is where the film sets its trap. If a written record is the only thing standing between you and the dark, what happens the day you can no longer tell whether you wrote down something that happened or something you were afraid of?

Most thrillers run on a quiet contract: what the camera shows you, happened. You reason from it. Deleuze called the break with that contract the powers of the false — cinema that stops measuring images against a truth out in the world and instead makes truth and falsehood genuinely undecidable, then builds from that undecidability rather than treating it as a problem to be cleared. Won Shin-yun doesn't sprinkle this on top of a normal thriller. He pours the whole movie out of it. The plot — is the daughter's boyfriend a killer, or is a dying brain manufacturing a villain to have one last thing to fight? — only works because no shot can be cashed in for fact.

Deleuze had a figure for the person who lives inside the false: the forger, the protagonist who doesn't discover the truth but produces it, whose identity keeps shifting under him. Byung-soo is the forger twice over. He once forged corpses into a private order only he understood; now Alzheimer's forges him, swapping out his certainties while he sleeps. When he stares at his own notebook and can't vouch for the handwriting, the film hands you the concept whole. He is the author of a memoir he can no longer authenticate.

The editing is where this becomes form rather than theme. Deleuze's term is falsifying narration — not a flashback you can date and file, but mutually exclusive versions presented as equally true, with no narrator standing outside to rank them. The dossier is precise about the craft: flash-fragments, involuntary memory, and prospective hallucination interrupt the present with no consistent formal flag, so on first pass you can't tell whether a cut moves forward, backward, or sideways into fabrication. Warm tones lean toward domestic memory, cool blue-grey toward the present investigation — but that grammar orients without resolving; it never hardens into a code you can trust. The third act then forces a retroactive rereading of everything before it. This is the architecture Deleuze's contemporaries would call a mind-game film: a structure that destabilizes its own reality and only pays out on a second viewing, because the first viewing was the trap.

What keeps it from being a mere puzzle box is duration. Against the hyperactive cutting of commercial thrillers, Won holds on Byung-soo's stilled, confused face — long enough that you feel the gap between recognizing something and knowing what it means. Deleuze would name that held face an affection-image, and more finely a qualisign: an immobile face offered not as a reaction in a chain of actions but as a pure quality, here the quality of a mind hovering at the edge of its own erasure. Nothing discharges into movement. The man who should act can only look. That is, exactly, Deleuze's pure optical situation — the seer who has lost the old reflex of perceiving-then-acting, stranded in front of an image he can register but can no longer master. A former killer, the most sensory-motor of all movie figures, reduced to watching.

When present and memory stop being distinguishable, Deleuze reached for the crystal: the image where the actual moment and its mirror — recollection, dream — fold into each other so tightly you can't say which face you're looking at. Byung-soo's notebooks are the crystal as prop. They're supposed to fix the past in place; instead they circulate it, and the warm-toned memories bleeding into the cool present make the household itself a hall of mirrors with the threshold — who gets let in, who gets shut out — eroding shot by shot. The image loses its self-evidence and starts asking to be deciphered, read like a document of uncertain provenance rather than simply watched.

The lineage is exact, and worth saying plainly. From Rashomon, testimony that can't be reconciled into one truth. From The Usual Suspects and Oldboy, the confession that rewrites the whole film on revelation. From Memento, cognitive disorder built directly into narrative shape so we share the deficit rather than observe it. From Memories of Murder, a rural Korean landscape where detection itself fails. Won's specific invention is to take all of that and relocate the unreliability from the world into the detective's own dissolving brain — and to render it digitally, in graded color and contrast that track perceptual states without ever certifying one as ground truth. That is the neuro-image: 21st-century digital cinema that doesn't depict a mind from outside but moves through one, recombinant, its archive corrupting in real time. Deleuze didn't live to name it, but Memoir is one of its cleaner cases.

What did the film do to its art? It found a body for the powers of the false that needs no metaphysics and no twist-for-its-own-sake: a brain that is genuinely losing its own evidence, so that unreliability is medical, intimate, and unfakeable. Watch it again. This time notice that you can never quite locate the seam between vigilance and paranoia — and that the film knew you couldn't, and built its dread precisely there.