A Lacanian-Foucauldian Analysis of Murder Report (2025): Spatial Confinement and the Subversion of Narrative Authority

Abstract

This paper is a Lacanian-Foucauldian critical analysis of the 2025 South Korean chamber Murder Report that explores how spatial confinement as a structural agent triggers the disintegration of professional identity and the destabilization of narrative authority. The movie introduces a forensic psychiatrist who goes about doing away with people who abuse his patients in a methodical way: a character the viewers hate at first but eventually find themselves sympathizing with. This paper uses the principles of Jacques Lacan of the Mirror Stage and the Other as well as the ideas of Power/Knowledge and Discourse of Michel Foucault as arguing that the closed interrogation-interview space is a psychic space where both the journalistic ego of the reporter and the moral certainty of the audience are systematically dismantled. The article goes on to address how the hierarchical reason of journalistic reportage is destroyed throughout the narrative structure of the film, shifting epistemic power, in the process, off the interviewer onto the perpetrator. In conclusion, the article finds that when there are physical and psychological trapping, the narration becomes a kind of collective transgression, and turns the seemingly neutral reporter into an accomplice of structure and the audience into an unintended accomplice in a revisionary ethics of violence.