For Lee Myung-Se, cinema is both a journey through the labyrinth of dreams and a detective’s report, taking images from within the brain and projecting them onto the screen. M (2007) contains within it both the sweet fantasy of First Love (1993) and the desolation of Their Last Love Affair (1996), which poisons both body and mind. Mimi (Lee Yeon-hee) is the core of this memoryfilm. The memory-film, as Lee Myung-Se conceives it, is a process of suffering through insomnia, summoning fragmented memories, and slipping unknowingly in and out of time and space like a sleepwalker. The white curtain over the window and the giant tent pitched in the schoolyard are at once screens onto which images from Minwoo’s (Gang Dong-won) brain are projected and the relentless gaze of a ghost summoning him. If his previous work The Duelist (2005), through repeated expansions and transformations of planes, arrived at the beautiful interplay of movement and disappearance, M is a desperate game of hide-and-seek in which the planes and depths of cinema chase one another, straining to make contact with Minwoo’s fractured memory-screen. The ghost named Mimi, memory, and love, play with cinema’s passion only to arrive, in the end, at Lee Myung-Se himself. (PARK Inho)