The Last Witness (1980) was censored for significant amount among 158-min long movie, unfortunately becoming a poorly edited film regardless of the director's intention. Since then, this movie was long-forgotten until Korean Film Archive produced the 154-min length edition using its original negative film with the ardent support of directors in the younger generation including Park Chan-wook, OH Seung-uk, and Ryoo Seung-wan, and played in major international film festivals and Cinémathèque. The Last Witness was digitally restored by Korean Film Archive using its own 4K digital restoration system for the retrospective exhibition of Lee Doo-yong, the director, at Busan International Film Festival in 2016, and invited to the Forum of Berlin International Film Festival in 2018, receiving favorable comment for mystery crime thriller masterpiece that has "broken the framework." 

The Last Witness, based on Song-Jong Kim's mystery story in the same title, starts when a detective Oh Byeongho (starred Hah Myung-joong) is assigned to investigate a murder case of the owner of a brewery in a country town. While seeking people involved with the history of the brewery owner Yang Dal-su (starred Lee Dae-keun), the detective Oh faces a series of the episode around Sohn Ji-hye (starred Jeong Yun-hui), a woman lived with Yang together, and finally comes close to the truth behind all. Hwang Ba-wu (starred Choi Bool-am) and Son Ji-hye have to suffer painful life in a fierce conflict between the leftists and the rightists and its tragedy forcing the human being to become like a beast, and the detective Oh exposes their secret sending them to destruction. Their agony and suffering are well pictured on screen by the overwhelmingly powerful directing of the director Lee Doo-yong. The director Lee's "camera movement technique demonstrates the energetic view on the screen and attracts audiences' attention at the same time which is a very rare style to achieve," making people immersed in the story for a little longer than 2.5 hours of its running time. As a road movie within the framework of a mystery story, The Last Witness pictures 4 season-views of Korea across the country. The hero, the detective Oh walks continuously through the heavy storm and cold wearing only a thin layer of a coat with its collar standing while smoking. Hah Myung-joong shows impressive acting starring a violent detective Oh with his intense visual but also a weak-minded human being who doesn't know what to do with the unbearably heavy truth. Hwang Ba-wu and Sohn Ji-hye, the innocent characters who can't even imagine questioning why they have to suffer, are excellently visualized on screen by Choi Bool-am and Jeong Yun-hui, respectively.             

Together with director Lee Doo-yong, younger directors Park Chan-wook and OH Seung-uk who have shown their admiration toward this movie, Kim Yeong-jin, a professor at Myongji University who discussed its remarkability at major film magazines, and Ju Seong-cheol, the editor-in-chief of "Cine 21" participated in the voice commentary of the Blu-ray edition of The Last Witness. Also, in this Blu-ray, Inuhiko Yomota, a former Culture and Art Faculty professor at Meiji University, portraits his unforgettable impression of a Korean film director Lee Doo-yong through his essay. A former professor Inuhiko Yomota became fascinated by director Lee after watching Rely on Your Brother in the late 1970s when he was yet to be discovered and used to call him "Samuel Fuller of Korea."