Tag: murder

Decision To Leave (Heojil Kyolshim)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

South Korea. City-based detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il from The Fortress, Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2017; The Host, 2006, Memories Of Murder, 2003, both Bong Joon ho) is married to a science nerd (Jung Yi-seo) who works at a nuclear plant in the seaside town of Ipo. Whatever sexual or romantic energy once existed between them has long since evaporated. She tolerates sex with him once a week on the grounds that research has shown it’s good for you and keeps you sharp, but she doesn’t appear to enjoy it much, going through the motions of a necessary chore. There doesn’t seem to be much more to this marriage for either of them than keeping up appearances. She lives and works in Ipo while he spends most of his working time away in the city, often going on nighttime stakeouts to observe suspects and forget about his habitual insomnia.

Which means that when Hae-joon finds himself investigating a case in which skilled amateur climber Ki Do-soo (Yoo Seung-mok from The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil, Lee Won-Tae, 2019; also The Host, Memories Of Murder) has fallen from a great height and the dead man’s Chinese-born wife Seo-rye (Tang Wei from Lust, Caution, Ang Lee, 2007) is a murder suspect, the detective is much more interested in her as a romantic subject than as a possible perpetrator, and this sensibility clouds his judgement. Eventually the case is closed, and she gets off scot-free, but the more time Hae-joon spends with her after this, and the more we see of her, the more likely it seems that she was the murderer.

The above constitutes what one might call the film’s first act. This first act and the subsequent second act, in which certain plot elements recur, recalls Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). In the second act, Hae-joon has moved to the seaside town presumably so that he can spend more time with his wife. One day the couple are wandering though the fish market where they run into Seo-rye, who by coincidence has likewise moved into the area, with her new and shady financial consultant husband in tow. The latter seems more keen than he should be to talk to Hae-joon’s wife and leaves her his card.

It turns out this second husband has a history as a scam merchant and has made a lot of enemies along the way. Before we get to know him much more, however, he turns up dead in his swimming pool. His wife could be responsible, but there is another suspect too, a victim of his sharp business practices, who looks more likely.

Rather than allowing all this to unfold in straightforward linear narrative fashion, director Park works in terms of layers and constantly jumps back and forth throughout. This is at once enthralling and infuriating to watch; enthralling because of the myriad of painstakingly worked out details piled on top of one another, infuriating because there is so much going on at any one time that it’s easy to lose track.

Things might make more sense on a second viewing, but equally they might simply prove as confusing as they did first time round. Without a second watch, it’s impossible to say. Nevertheless, it’s a very rich film, thoroughly engrossing; one to which, having seen it once, you’ll want to return.

Decision To Leave is out in cinemas from Friday, 21st October. On Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Curzon Home Cinema in March.

Earthquake Bird

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tokyo, 1989. An American woman who’s not long been in Japan has disappeared and the last person to see her alive is Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander) who has lived in the country for five years, two months. Lucy is hauled in for questioning by the police and as her life in Japan slowly reveals itself in flashback, it becomes apparent why they want to talk to her.

Lucy is quiet, reserved, introverted. She mostly keeps herself to herself. She fits in well in Japanese society with its emphasis on the importance of the group over the individual. She is fluent in Japanese and works as a translator. She plays cello in an amateur string quartet with three much older Japanese women.

She also socialises with a group of international expats which is where Bob (Jack Huston) introduces her to the woman about whom the police wish to question her, Lily Bridges (Riley Keough) who is working as a nurse. The two women possess very different personalities. Lucy might be foolish to agree to take the newly arrived foreigner under her wing and show her the ropes. Lily is the stereotypical American: brash, outgoing and nosy. Not someone you imagine adapting well to Japanese society. She doesn’t even speak the language.

Lucy’s life changes when she runs into a man taking photographs on the street. He claims not to be interested in photographing people, only buildings, water, reflections. Something hooks her. Teiji Matsuda (Naoki Kobayashi) works at a noodle restaurant, but amateur photography is his passion. Soon she’s regularly going back to his flat, strangely situated at the top of an exterior spiral staircase and fully equipped as a darkroom, to be photographed. When on one occasion she removes her top, he tells her that wasn’t what he wanted. Before long, however, the pair have entered into a full-on, physical relationship.

She becomes obsessed with the photographs of old girlfriends Teiji keeps locked away in a filing cabinet. She knows where the key is and takes a look. When he later finds out, he is not pleased. Lily, meanwhile, wants to meet the boyfriend and when she does is clearly attracted to Teiji. This classic love triangle setup is fuelled by the growing tension between Lucy and Teiji.

Much as it would like to play like a Japanese thriller, Earthquake Bird is the adaptation of an English novel and it doesn’t feel very Japanese – despite a great quantity of Japanese dialogue, much of it delivered by Vikander. (To her credit, for this film she had to learn both the Japanese language and playing the cello, the latter something she’d learned a little as a child.) That said, as an outsider’s view of Japan, it’s convincing enough. And it has to have something of a grasp of Japanese culture and the country’s mindset to work.

When the police initially question Lucy, they do so in second-rate English until they discover she’s fluent in Japanese, something she doesn’t initially reveal. This seems to be typical of the woman. She is beset by guilt for an incident in her pre-Japan past for which she rightly or wrongly believes herself responsible.

For those wondering about the title, it relates to a bird that, as Teiji explains to Lucy, if you listen carefully, can be quietly heard to sing following an earthquake. There are several small-scale literal earthquakes in the narrative, that are soon over without any ill after effects. And then there are minor earthquake-comparable incidents, like a violinist from the string quartet slipping down steps to her death, to the shame of her fellow player who has recently polished the stairs and fears she may be responsible for the accident. Or Lucy falling ill when she, Teiji and Lily go on a day trip to Sado Island.

The whole is visually arresting throughout, with top-notch cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon who shot Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016) and production design by Yohei Tanada who also did ManHunt (John Woo, 2017) and The Third Murder (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2017), so while you could wait a couple of weeks for it to turn up on Netflix, you might enjoy it more if you see it on the big screen first. As you might expect from Wash Westmoreland, previously the co-writer-director behind Still Alice (2014) and Colette (2018), this is as much character and culture study as it is thriller, which may infuriate some but reward those with the patience to take it on its own terms.

Earthquake Bird is out in the UK on Friday, November 1st. On Netflix in March!

Out Of Blue

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Morley’s latest film is both infuriating and enthralling in equal measure. Infuriating because its convoluted plot, firing off in several directions one after another, is often nigh on impossible to follow. Enthralling because while you never quite know where you are, it periodically throws at you utterly compelling little visual clues and sequences of images as teasers to suggest narrative or other possibilities.

Some viewers are going to hate this film and wonder why they wasted their money to see it. Others like myself, while not showering the film with unqualified praise, are going to want to revisit it several times and get more out of it each time they return. If you’ve got the patience and are prepared to dig on a first viewing and return later to dig some more, there’s a lot waiting to be unearthed here.

After a brief introductory sequence in which astronomer Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) talks to a small audience outside an observatory about the stars and our place in the universe, she becomes the subject of a homicide case. But who pulled the trigger and blew her face off?

Finding herself in charge of the investigation, Police Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) examines the crime scene. Rainfall has interfered with it through the opened telescope slit in the domed roof. She notes such objects as a gun, a sock, a high heeled shoe and a jar of skin cream. She is approached by and surprisingly quickly falls in with TV news reporter Stella Honey (Devyn Tyler) who appears at unexpected moments and disappears equally unexpectedly.

The two immediate murder suspects are Jennifer’s boss Dr. Ian Strammi (Toby Jones) – it was his gun and he covered up the telescope but didn’t close the roof – and her boyfriend Duncan Reynolds (Jonathan Majors) – it was his sock. Reynolds’ alibi was that he rushed home after lovemaking to work on an all-consuming academic theory, Strammi’s that he spent all night with a female student discussing Schrödinger’s Cat. Hoolihan’s boss Lieutentant Janey McBride (Yolanda Ross) and colleague Tony Silvero (Aaron Tveit) have different ideas, including the latter’s belief that the perpetrator is the .38 Calibre Killer who hasn’t killed since the 1980s.

Something doesn’t feel quite right to Hoolihan, though, so she turns her attention outwards to the victim’s family – war hero father Colonel Tom (James Caan), mother Miriam (Jacki Weaver) and their twin sons.

The plot may or may not be clearer in Martin Amis’ novel Night Train from which Morley’s script is adapted, although she’s apparently removed and added quite a lot of material. The New Orleans setting allows for a commendably interracial cast and a clutch of striking performances. Chief among these is Clarkson’s detective, trying to just get on and do her job even as elements from the case on which she’s working resonate with half-remembered memory fragments from her own past. Or perhaps they’re prophetic images from her future.

Morley tantalisingly baffles and dazzles us with repeating images: a red scarf blowing in the wind of an electric fan, blue necklace baubles dropping onto and bouncing on a floor. The piece ends as it begins with images of the stars in the sky above the city.

All this proceeds in a kaleidoscopic manner focusing on a character here and a bunch of images there until a point towards the end where one of the images furnishes a key clue as to what all this is about and the solution is abruptly revealed in a curt couple of lines of dialogue that could have been thrown in at any earlier point in the proceedings.

As far as Morley’s concerned, the plot doesn’t seem to be what really matters. Her interest lies elsewhere – trauma, memory, repression. Our past affecting our present. Some intensely personal events have influenced Morley’s directing: her father committed suicide when she was eleven and according to the press blurb there were characters and situations in Amis’ novel that she immediately recognised as from her past. If the film doesn’t work so well as a straightforward genre exercise, those viewers with the patience to let it speak to them on its own terms over multiple viewings will find it rich in meaning indeed.

Out Of Blue is out in the UK on Friday, March 29th. Before then, it screens in the Glasgow Film Festival on Wednesday and Thursday, February 27th and 28th. On VoD (BFI Player and other platforms) on Monday, October 21st.

Is it acceptable to portray a horrific real crime in film?

Posted on by victorfraga

One sympathises with Vincent Lambe. How could one not? A simple scroll through Twitter exhibits the cruellest and most vicious of comments levelled at a filmmaker whose newest work many refuse to watch. You can read them here, here and here, plus there was a flurry of further inflammatory comments (and also insults) outside these tweet threads. This little online commotion waas in response to my review of his latest film Detainment, published last week. Admittedly, he didn’t choose the nicest or easiest of stories to deal with. Lambe opened up to controversy by openly dealing with the James Bulger case, a murder that still amazes, horrifies and disgusts those who remember it.

I’m not one of those people. Born in Ireland in August 1993, time and geography has impeded any firsthand knowledge of the senseless Liverpool killings which occurred that February. My knowledge on the subject was rudimentary when I reviewed the film that many were calling for it to be withdraws from the Oscars. What I saw astonished me.

A work of naked reality, temerity and nuance, Detainment is a movie which grabs its viewers with the opening shot of two boys playing truant on the escalators. It is by no means of piece of exploitation cinema. Whisking sweets into their pockets, the boys amuse themselves with a toy soldier, breaking its body in half with glee. The film cuts to a procedural room, a series of officers incredulous that these children, fresh faced in appearance, could murder a toddler. Through memories and flashbacks, the pair walk with a child, watching him stumble, letting onlookers turn to their daily needs, offering him the stations of his own crucifix. Biblical in theme, the film offers a grounded selection of setups and cuts, mindful that this was a true event.

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Children or devils?

A quick click through Google details that the police transcripts which it purports itself on are the real quotes. Verbatim, the leads recite words that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson recorded on tape. Ely Solan’s Jon is teary-eyed, Leon Hughes’s Robert isn’t, the procedural scenes differ from the disconcerting to the vomit inducing. Lambe portrays these developments as realistically as Steven Spielberg did detailing the atrocities of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993) and the actions from Israeli retaliation in Munich (2005; pictured above), using that adjective rarely seen in cinemas predicated to screening Disney and Marvel films: truth.

A truth so unsettling and harrowing, asking viewers not to view their subjects as devils, but children. Children that acted cruelly, horrifically, sadistically and stupidly. Tara Breathnach’s mother doesn’t know how to hug her son after discovering what Jon has done, but cannot bring herself to hate the child she bore. Will O Connell’s detective gleans surprise from his eye overlooking a wanted poster for the two murderers, incapable of comprehending the youth of the killer he is driving to prison. Lambe isn’t making a film about murder; it’s a film about people. “I think people are so used to thinking of these boys as being evil” Lambe admitted to The Standard “that when they start to see something authentic it doesn’t sit very well with them.”

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Monstrous killers in film

Authenticity isn’t always a trait associated with cinema, but, used correctly, it’s one of the more powerful and respectful means by which a message can be delivered. Lambe is much more respectful of his subjects than the popular sitcom Gavin & Stacey (which asked its viewers to enjoy a Christmas With The Shipman’s, despite the deliberate allusions the surviving families had to endure every subsequent Christmas thanks to a real life Shipman) and the subversive Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino/Eli Roth, 2009; a film featuring Jewish soldiers more aggressive in their killings than the Nazis ) were. Directing a film about killers does not equate to condoning their actions. It just acknowledges these actions happened with the tools available to a filmmaker.

Patty Jenkins’ oeuvre resonates beyond D.C. comics. In 2003, she unveiled Monster (pictured above), a biopic concerning serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a former prostitute who executed in Florida in 2002 for killing six men. It detailed the characteristics Wuornos displayed, traits of antisocial personality disorder and borderline personality disorder within her. Later, David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007; pictured below) detailed the habits and killings an anonymous serial killer enacted, exploring a manhunt that soured the 1960s for many. Harrowing the subject matters are, Zodiac still proved Fincher’s most rewarding work since Seven (1995), while the stellar Charlize Theron provided one of her steelier performances playing the inexpiable Wuornos (Theron was deservedly awarded with an Oscar in 2004). You’ll frequently find both of these films in books detailing the greatest cinema has to offer audiences.

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The Silence of the Lambe

Yet Detainment’s reception has been one of anger and disgust, rather than critical acclaim. Denise Fergus (Bulger’s grief stricken mother) has admonished the Academy for admiring a film about her son’s death. An online petition heralded by Fergus drew more than 100,000 signatures, asking for its withdrawal. President Michael D.Higgins’ Twitter met with uproar when he congratulated Detainment amongst the Irish films nominated for an Oscar. A lot of it is understandable. For all his artistic proclivities and cinematic gifts, Lambe omitted to inform Fergus of his intention’s to make a film detailing a memory far too close for Fergus’s comfort. It was an oversight Lambe has subsequently apologised for, though it might have come at a cost of his public cache.

None of this takes away from what is an exceptional 30 minutes of art. Tight, claustrophobic, searing, the film stars two exceptional leads, actors with abilities which should serve them in their impending careers as actors. Solan is animalistic, Hughes is minimalistic, both are terrific. They find within their characters the authenticity and truth Lambe aspired for, and for that, it deserves its place in the Academy’s shortlist.

Memoir Of A Murderer (Sal-In-Ja-Eu Ki-Eok-Beob)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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. Like so much in this convoluted South Korean thriller, that might be highly significant or symbolic, a metaphor, a journey, a state of mind. Or it might not. It’s undeniably a visually striking and arresting starting point. In the manner of frame stories or flashbacks in so many films, we return to this sequence towards the end. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Like Memento, Memoir of a Murderer takes place in the subjective experience of a memory-unreliable protagonist. Unlike Memento, Memoir of a Murderer‘s dramatic structure is not rigorously ordered and indeed can be quite disorientating and confusing at times. For example, a flashback early on has the ageing Kim recall his many murders. As he tells it, he only ever killed for a good reason, only people who deserved to die. 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 Kim sees it, he’s preventing pain and possibly murder being inflicted on other people by killing his chosen victims. 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. 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. This is not a man upon whose memory, short or long term, we can rely.

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. And he recalls his violent car accident 17 years earlier which is where all his memory problems started. 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. 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. 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.

The narrative plays some neat tricks on the audience. When Kim forgets who his daughter is, he tries to strangle her. Later, having forgotten this episode, he sees red marks on her neck and assumes rival killer and her boyfriend Min to be responsible. And because his memory is less than reliable, we’re not quite sure who or what to believe.

The ante is upped via a series of initially believable but increasingly less plausible plot developments. Kim learns through his mate the local cop (Oh Dal-su) who runs a check on the car number plate for him as a favour that owner Min is a cop. Later on, Min, running into Eun-hee outside Kim’s veterinary practice, starts dating the girl. By the time we reach the revelation of a particular death, credibility has stretched well beyond breaking point. Which is a shame, because before the proceedings topple into silliness, the way they keep you guessing is highly effective while the overall narrative delivers more than its share of suspense, shocks and surprises. And the whole thing is based on such a memorable premise.

Memoir Of A Murderer showed at the BFI London Film Festival in 2017, when this piece was originally written. It shows on Monday, May 21st (2018), in London and Cambridge as part of the London Korean Film Festival.