First premiering at the Berlinale, Kill Boksoon is a head-scratching thriller pitched as one of Netflix’s tentpole films for its Korean slate in 2023. The lead character’s name — which is also the film’s title — is a homophone that plays on a relatively common surname in Korea (“Gil”) and the violent and bloody vocation of career assassin Boksoon. Arriving on the streaming platform on March 31st, Kill Boksoon is as progressive as it is formulaic, veering between straight-laced action and poignant family drama. 

Reminiscent of John Wick, Boksoon (Jeon Do-yeon) is a contract killer working for an agency called MK Ent., where an aura of white-collar sophistication lightly veils the gory labor involved. MK Ent.’s leaders dress in formal wear and suits, the organization has an employees’ code of conduct, kill assignments are called “shows,” and arriving on the location of the kill is termed “being on set.” Besides juggling an upcoming contract renewal with MK Ent., Boksoon is also a single mother with a teenage daughter, Jae-young (Kim Si-a). 

Veteran actress Jeon has courageously opted for an action-heavy role as the titular character here — a big departure, as her career has largely revolved around more emotionally layered dramatic fare. In 2007, Jeon won the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, becoming the first Korean person to receive any acting award at the prestigious festival. 

The film has a number of things going for it. Boksoon is every bit the empowered woman — a confident go-getter and top employee (a 100 percent success rate!) who commands the respect of her peers — well, at least at first. She is unfazed by the double duties of work and family, belting out kicks and chops at work before tending to her daughter at home. 

However, one assignment stops her abruptly in her tracks, and her failure to kill causes Boksoon to stray into treacherous waters with her ruthless boss Cha Min-gyu (Sol Kyung-gu) and his sister Min-hee (Esom). Soon, Boksoon finds herself on her company’s kill list instead and pursued by her colleagues. At the same time, her daughter Jae-young is struggling with bullying and blackmail when a schoolmate finds out that she is lesbian and attracted to her best friend. 

Kill Boksoon’s best moments come when the film steps away from back-breaking action and invests in the emotional arc of its promising cast. The gang of contract killers at MK Ent. form a notably talented ensemble — which includes rising actor Koo Kyo-hwan (D.P., Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula) and Lee Yeon — who all make the most of their limited screen time. Mature beyond her years, Kim Si-a also puts in a stunning effort as Boksoon’s daughter, who communicates both the seriousness and innocence of young love with aplomb. The emotional layers of the film’s final scene between mother and daughter are especially well-crafted.

Yet, as Boksoon’s career screeches to a halt, the film similarly runs aground with its overly showy and excessively long action sequences. There is no doubt that director Byun Sung-hyun has several impressive shots in his wheelhouse, often using reflections in puddles and mirrors to remind viewers of his characters’ complexities and multifarious identities. However, meaningful character development and dialogue are often sacrificed at the altar of dizzying action. 

What also holds the film back is the morally dubious territory that the story wades into and never gets unstuck from. From the beginning, Byun’s film already has an uphill task in balancing an encouraging storyline of an empowered female and convincing the audience to suspend disbelief due to Boksoon’s troubling profession. Charming as Boksoon is, it’s an inherently difficult moral undertaking for the viewer: “Hey, be inspired by the independent, empowered Boksoon but ignore how she’s actually a serial murderer!” The tender, nuanced relationships carved out in the film would have found far more mileage had Boksoon been given a more redeemable occupation — even a Robin Hood-styled thief role would have made the narrative more palatable. 

The wacky absurdity of Kill Boksoon’s circumstances finds a moment of welcome lucidity when Han Hee-seong (Koo Kyo-hwan) muses to Boksoon in an attempt to rationalize their vocations: “The world is full of irony. We start wars for peace. We want truth. We believe lies. Killers gather and they make the rules.” It is perhaps most useful to think of Kill Boksoon as a bit of a philosophical thought experiment (albeit a 137-minute one filled with nasty blood splatter). In a world where the moral code is turned upside down and laws seemingly do not exist, how does one still behave ethically or according to one’s conscience? Beneath the veneer of an unflappable, accomplished assassin, Boksoon clearly is not completely at ease with what she does. 

The only assignment that Boksoon ever fails to complete becomes the pivotal moral prick of Kill Boksoon, and Jae-young plays a key role in this sequence. Despite Boksoon’s best efforts to keep the two worlds separate, the sacred curtain between work and life shatters. Yet, this is also the very moment that keeps the film afloat and drives the emotional momentum for the rest of Kill Boksoon as we watch Boksoon grapple with the weight of her vocation, conscience, and identity. 

Boksoon fears that Jae-young will find out about the grisly nature of her occupation — often dodging or redirecting Jae-young’s questions. As Boksoon wrestles with acknowledging that her life’s priorities have changed, Jae-young similarly struggles to accept the developments in her romantic relationship. Unmoored in their respective existential journeys, mother and daughter slowly gravitate toward each other, comforted by a newfound bond. 

Kill Boksoon is streaming now on Netflix.

Netflix has released many glitzy, action-filled episodic series this year, including All of Us Are Dead and Money Heist: Korea. But its next big action piece is a film, Carter, which stars Joo Won in the leading role. The usually clean-cut heartthrob image of Joo Won undergoes a startling transformation here into the rugged, ruffian-like Carter (the namesake of the film’s title). Carter is directed by Jung Byung-gil, who has made his career out of his stylized, high-octane action direction in films like The Villainess (2017) and Confession of Murder (2012). 

Viewers who are looking for a solid action film will find plenty of thrills in the captivating, sleekly edited Carter, where its action sequences are all woven together to give the film a “one take” effect. There are stunning aerial views of rooftop fights and waterfall escapes, alongside spine-tingling chases through dimly lit cavernous rooms — with the increasingly familiar backdrop of tension between North and South Korea thrown in. What Carter sets out to accomplish in action, choreography, and set design, it pulls off with great aplomb.

However, those looking for a more character-driven story or who have a lower tolerance for long, elaborate action sequences might find Carter’s 132-minute runtime a bit too overwhelming. 

Carter begins with an exposition-heavy introduction, noting that the Korean peninsula is grappling with a dire infectious outbreak of the “DMZ virus.” The viral infection creates “animal-like behaviors” and increases violent tendencies in the infected. Leaders from North and South Korea are working together to create an antibody treatment using the blood of Doctor Jung’s daughter, named Ha-na, who was cured of the DMZ virus infection through her father’s research. However, Doctor Jung (Jung Jae-young) and Ha-na (Kim Bo-min) go missing during a transfer arrangement to North Korea, where the doctor was supposed to further his research and mass-produce a cure for the virus at the Sinuiju Chemical Weapons Institute. There, crowds of infected North Korean patients are also held in quarantine. Meanwhile, Carter wakes up and finds a mysterious voice giving him instructions through an earpiece. He has no choice but to follow through with the mission as he has a lethal bomb embedded in his mouth.

The DMZ virus outbreak takes place only 10 months after a cease-fire between North and South Korea, with the armistice in delicate balance amid distrust on both sides over the botched transfer of Doctor Jung and Ha-na. The geopolitical backdrop and health crisis provide the necessary narrative stakes amid the film’s nonstop whirlwind of action. There is also a whole cast of fascinating characters: foreign liaisons, North Korean Workers’ Party members, military leaders, intelligence agents, infectious disease doctors, and children. Unfortunately, each of them is only lightly used (with the exception of young Ha-na); they exit as quickly as they enter, leaving viewers to rue the missed opportunities to deepen the film’s storytelling and character arcs. 

There is an acute sense in Carter that the action will always take precedence over character development or well-crafted emotional turns. The film also has a considerable amount of gore, which feels prolonged or even indulged by the “one shot” style of the film. At several points in Carter, viewers may struggle to find answers to some fundamental questions in the sacred art of crafting a story: what is currently driving the story’s protagonist, Carter, to take on such a disproportionate amount of risk? On the other side, what are the reasons behind the antagonist’s decisions? In essence, what is the motivation behind the action of each character? 

One of the biggest talking points of Carter is the “single take” style that it was shot in. While the film is admittedly made up of several shots, the overall effect works. As the film breathlessly moves from a public bathhouse to a bus, warehouse, medical facility, clothes shop, and airplane, just to name a few, the “single take” style gives Carter a feeling of vastness in space that few action films have been able to achieve. The camera tirelessly chases the equally industrious Carter through the physical space, trapped together in the chaos and uncertainty. There is neither reprieve offered by an alternative angle nor extra knowledge gained through an establishing shot; the enemy can emerge from any direction.

Several sequences are a triumph of filmmaking, particularly those involving vehicles soaring through a dizzying array of backdrops: a motorbike chase scene through labyrinthian streets and alleyways, an airplane standoff that transforms into a skydiving fight scene (which was shot with the actors really skydiving) and a fight sequence involving trucks and jeeps speeding through an agricultural landscape. Sequences are threaded together nearly effortlessly — a stark contrast to the unimaginably labor-intensive work and planning that went into creating Carter. At times, the film feels like one giant, tangled escape room game. There is perhaps a nagging question here of whether Carter’s cinematic accomplishments are wasted on the small screens that Netflix’s audiences will encounter the film, as all the effort may not fully translate to home viewing. 

It is in the last 25 minutes of the film that Carter really digs into the meatier issues and develops an unexpected emotional gravity. There is the question of kinship — the family we are born into and the “family” we find — and how duties of responsibility and care figure into these relationships. The film also raises questions about identity and the information war through Carter’s loss of memory. The pervasiveness of technology — the film takes this very literally, through the embedded electronics in Carter’s body — reverberates with relevance. Just as Carter grapples with trying to figure out his identity through the ceaseless influx of text messages as well as information given by a faceless voice, technology has also disconcertingly become a major force in determining knowledge about ourselves and the world.

These are all interesting questions raised by Carter. However, viewers may find themselves having to dig well beneath the film’s explosions and chase scenes to find them.

Carter is streaming on Netflix now.

Expectations were sky-high for Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area, even before its launch. The original Money Heist from Spain (La Casa de Papel) was one of Netflix’s most-watched series and later went on to win the International Emmy Award for Best Drama Series in 2018. This crossover with the seismic force of Korean content — in the golden age that it is in right now — surely throws open the sheer scope of what Netflix can achieve with its ever-growing library of popular franchises. 

For the most part, part 1 is a lively adventure, helmed by a highly capable cast. The set design of the labyrinthian Unified Korea Mint deserves special recognition for its versatility — full of opportunities to reveal the restless mechanisms of money-making or to conceal the machinations of those who desire its riches. Viewers of the original Money Heist will also recognize familiar narrative structures bolstering the Korean remake: the achronological narrative, which both drives tension and withholds information, and the unreliable narrator, Tokyo, continuously shifting the sands of the story’s reality. 

Gaining the blessing of Money Heist creator Álex Pina for a Korean remake, Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area launched its first six episodes (part 1) on June 24th. It is set in the near future, where the current Joint Security Area between North and South Korea has been turned into a Joint Economic Area. An area of bitter division quickly becomes the shining symbol of unification, with the exciting promise of new business opportunities and a shared currency — printed at the Unified Korea Mint. 

However, a professor specializing in research on the economic impact of unification becomes increasingly disillusioned by the exploitation of low-wage migrant workers and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots after unification. He then assembles a ragtag crew of eight thieves to conduct a heist of 4 trillion won at the Unified Korea Mint. 

Each character from the main ensemble feels equally capable of innocence or evil, mercy or violence. Veteran actor Yoo Ji-tae, as the professor, dances between a righteous, Robinhood-like charm and a penchant for cold manipulation. Lost’s Kim Yunjin delicately balances the immense personal strife that her character, senior inspector Seon Woo-jin, is facing and a high-stakes crisis negotiation amid the heist. Park Hae-soo (most recently of Squid Game fame) plays the formidable Berlin, who believes in wielding power through fear. Yet, privately, his unresolved trauma from surviving in North Korea’s infamous Gaecheon concentration camp can quickly turn him into an anxious figure, breaking out in a cold sweat. Jeon Jong-seo (Burning) plays a North Korean woman, Tokyo, who is quietly trying to piece back together her dreams after suffering from fraud and abuse as a migrant worker. 

Relying on the strength of its cast and sleek action sequences, Money Heist: Korea seems more certain about its means — get into the Mint, hold people hostage (but don’t kill anyone!), print the money, get out — than its ends. After setting up such a promising context and convincing universe, Money Heist: Korea sometimes feels like it is imprisoned by its own ambition and unsure of how to get out.

Arguably the most important thing for any story to achieve is to convince the viewer to root for its protagonist(s) — however flawed they might be. We must grow to see the world from their perspective, feel with them in their triumphs and defeats, and champion for their victory. However, once we look past the charm of its main ensemble, one might question: why should I root for this group of thieves who are essentially seeking personal riches at the expense of hard-won reunification of the peninsula? (And not root for, perhaps, the hungry, overworked hostages, who really have nothing to do with all of this?) If we go by the endings of previous seasons of the original Money Heist, perhaps this is a question that will be answered when part 2 comes out (date still unannounced). 

Some of the most lauded Korean Netflix original series in recent years — like Kingdom, D.P., or Squid Game — have demonstrated that its action-packed shows are immensely capable of sharp, incisive social commentary. However, the commentary in Money Heist: Korea feels a bit more blunted. It is certainly there, but it gets lost amid the bang and buzz of the hostage crisis in the Mint. 

The strongest and most reasonable motivation comes through Tokyo. Seeing her own “Korean dream” shatter after leaving the North Korean army and migrating to the South, Tokyo drives home a point about the widening economic disparities brought about by reunification and the plight of migrant workers. In the first episode, she curses under her breath, “Welcome to capitalism.” The heist is her opportunity for a breakthrough — and to reclaim many times over what she feels she has lost through the cruelties of such an economic system. 

Some of the series’ best sequences actually come in the first few minutes of each episode, where the show opens with a glimpse of each character’s backstory. It helps to sketch each character’s journey in a more nuanced manner, gives gravity to their cause, and allows us to understand why they might have joined the professor’s heist in the first place. 

Another critical commentary is made through the masks that the heist crew wears, which are modeled after the Korean hahoe masks. The hahoe masks, in their varying shapes, forms and expressions, traditionally represent the social status of its characters. In the original Money Heist, the Salvador Dali mask was used to express resistance in the face of injustice, and the heist was a way of bringing financial restoration to people who have been hit hardest by the cruel edges of capitalism. 

With the heist crew’s adamant sense that what they are doing is honorable and good, the six unreleased episodes that make up part 2 are left to answer: will the ends really justify the means?

Part one of Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area is streaming now on Netflix.

Watching Pachinko is to have an audience with something deeply sacred and profound. Adapted from Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel of the same name, Apple TV Plus’ most ambitious project yet is a sublime epic that questions cultural identities, national histories, and intergenerational memory and mourning.

The eight-episode series follows Sunja through the upheavals in her life across the 20th century, starting from her birth in the southern coastal city of Busan during the Japanese colonization of Korea. An exceptional boldness and truthfulness in vision reverberate through every layer of Pachinko: its story is full of searing humanity, its casting is thoughtful, and the project boasts a formidable multi-national team of producers, consultants, and crew. Even details like the subtitles — colored in yellow for dialogue in Korean and blue for Japanese — inscribe cultural nuance and complexity, demanding a less familiar viewer to engage actively with the text.

Pachinko will undoubtedly land differently with various audiences depending on their proximity to the show’s historical context, but ultimately, this is a story in search of a spiritual response — one that will linger indelibly in a viewer’s consciousness.

Directed by Justin Chon (Blue Bayou, Gook) and Kogonada (After Yang, Columbus), the series jumps between early 1900s Korea and 1980s Japan, and takes many other detours throughout. We meet a whole cast of characters from Sunja’s life: her parents, suitors, children, sister- and brother-in-law, boarders living in her parents’ home, and grandson Solomon Baek. Sunja’s character is played by a cast of three phenomenal actresses, Jeon Yu-na (in her childhood years), Kim Min-ha (as a teenager), and Academy Award-winner Youn Yuh-jung (in her later years). Pachinko also stars Lee Min-ho (Koh Han-su), Anna Sawai (Naomi), and Jin Ha (Solomon Baek). 

The nonlinear construction of time in the Pachinko series marks a significant departure from Lee’s novel, which progresses chronologically, turning this adaptation into a radically different project. Some of Pachinko’s jumps between past and present play out majestically — fleshing out themes like displacement, cultural identity, death, migration, yearning, and ambition. Being able to witness the full expanse of history, it is easy to grow fond of Pachinko’s characters, understanding the past strife that they are burdened and enlightened by. 

In these better juxtapositions, Pachinko’s achronological movements imbue the present with the gravity of the past and the sacredness of the grand stories of old. For example, a bowl of Korean white rice (“nuttier” and “sweeter”) that Sunja eats while visiting another zainichi lady’s house suddenly takes on ancient meanings: a resonance of childhood, a grain seller’s generosity, and a mother’s parting gift. With knowledge of past events through the intercutting of scenes, these meanings become touched with the sacred grief of all that one has loved and lost, yet also soothed by the consolation that remembrance brings.

In other moments however, there is a question of whether these temporal jumps decenter Sunja’s experience for the sake of TV suspense and interrupt the emotional journey that a viewer might have with Sunja. Pachinko might have worked better if it was stingier with the number of cuts between past and present, allowing viewers to linger with the characters and grow with them. One episode towards the later part of the series also takes a historical detour that feels particularly disjointed with the rest of the story. Yet, these bumps do not take away the shine from Pachinko — the sheer force and momentum of its story emphatically drive it from beginning to end. 

Besides its preoccupation with time, Pachinko is also a meditation about land. Solomon Baek, Sunja’s grandson, is well-groomed and America-educated, caught between several identities and cultures. Despite having a record of successful deals, he is denied a pay bump and promotion — and the accompanying respect — at his New York finance firm. To impress the upper management, he takes on the challenge of scooping up a final, tiny plot of land on a site in Tokyo marked for future hotel development. He is unfazed by the “one landowner hold[ing] the entire deal hostage” — an elderly zainichi Korean lady, Grandmother Han. She refuses to sell her home on the site, spurning repeated offers from developers. 

A shot revealing a bird’s-eye view of mammoth construction cranes and equipment already on-site shows the ground being leveled all around. The area has turned into a dreary brown, ready for the development of Tokyo’s high-rises and towers, inviolable proof that the machines of cosmopolitanism and capitalist progress are alive and churning. We learn that grandmother Han — who moved to Japan in 1929 — had bought the plot of land in 1955 for 4,000 yen. Besides sharing stories of his grandmother and their similar cultural backgrounds to break the ice, Solomon attempts to charm Grandmother Han with rare gifts and an increased offer of one billion yen, but she remains stubbornly unwilling to sell the house. He reassures her, “Grandmother, you won. Today you’ll secure great wealth for your children and their children.” Solomon’s colleague, the brash Tom Andrews, cannot understand, calling Grandmother Han’s plot a “tiny piece of shitland.” Another colleague, Naomi, tactfully suggests, “It’s not about the money, not for her.” 

Grandmother Han painfully shares with Solomon that her children, born and raised in Japan, “don’t even know the language in which their mother dreams.” The Japanese occupation of Korea ripped away the ground of her homeland from beneath her feet, forced her to move to Tokyo, and then cleaved her native Korean tongue from her children and descendants. If land is the beginning of belonging, then colonization is the traumatic rupture of this principle: the colonized becomes an exile in one’s own home. For the elderly Korean woman unwilling to sell her Tokyo house, clinging on to this plot of land in the country of her colonizer is therefore a radical act — it is a redemptive rebellion, a reclamation of space born from the ashes of personal and national tragedy. 

In many ways, the enormity of the Pachinko series extends far beyond the small screens we watch it on. It speaks to — and also challenges — our cultural moment. Pachinko is a (long overdue) redefinition of what “tentpole” content from a major streamer can be: whose story it tells, where it comes from and who should have more seats at the table. Pachinko has the qualities to become the new standard-bearer of what a show on a streamer can aspire to be, given the international resources, expansive global reach, and creative expression that a streaming platform like Apple TV Plus offers. In Pachinko, Apple has woven together an extraordinary project that will hopefully herald many more to come.

Pachinko premieres on Apple TV Plus on March 25th.

Early on in All of Us Are Dead, student Lee Cheong-san exclaims to his peers as they fend off a wave of zombies swarming their suburban Hyosan High School, “It’s Train to Busan!” Another replies, “Why are they at school? They should be in movies.” With this tongue-in-cheek meta-reference to its notable film predecessor, it is a sign that the Korean zombie subgenre has well and truly sunk its grisly teeth into the popular cultural imagination. 

First rising to global acclaim with the commercial and critical hit Train to Busan in 2016, the Korean zombie lineage also includes Netflix’s groundbreaking historical series Kingdom (2019), as well as films like Peninsula (Train to Busan sequel) and #Alive (2020). Through the grotesque figure of the zombie and its transitions between the human and the monstrous, these Korean shows have launched a terrifying critique of society in all of its moral wastes and systemic ills.

The high school setting in All of Us Are Dead marks a unique departure from previous locations used in Korean zombie shows. In the midst of the dread and destruction, the youthful setting opens up opportunities for adolescent banter and burgeoning love. We meet the loyal Lee Cheong-san, along with the buoyant Nam On-jo, who puts her survival knowledge learned from her firefighter father to good use. Class president and top student Choi Nam-ra is initially aloof and distant, though we later learn she is just fighting her own demons, like so many other students. Lee Su-hyeok and Yang Dae-su also make up the main group of students meandering through science labs, broadcasting rooms, music studios, the cafeteria, and teachers’ offices in their bid to survive and find a safe haven. What then is so wrong with the world here?

The immense pressure of the Korean high school setting — one which ends with the dreaded be-all-end-all university entrance exams, also known as Suneung — breaks and bends each student into despair differently. Some, like Choi Nam-ra, withdraw into isolation, earphones plugged in and eyes glued to her notes. Others, like Park Mi-jin and captain of the school archery team Jang Ha-ri, are overwhelmed by a defeated hopelessness about their future. A few more take out their anger on others and become school bullies — like the notorious Yoon Gwi-nam, who does not think twice about inflicting harm on others. The dehumanizing effects of fear become magnified by adolescent insecurities, reducing each young, vibrant soul into quivering shells of their former selves. In other words, the high school becomes a perfect setting for the mass production of a zombie population.  

In the origin story of the zombie infection, a male student is frequently and violently bullied. His father, Mr. Lee, holds a PhD in cell biology and works as a science teacher in the same high school that his son is studying in. At wits’ end, he researches and creates the “Jonas Virus,” which preys on fear in humans and turns it into rage in a bid to make his son stronger and cope with the bullying. However, as these things usually go, the experiment turns out all wrong, and an infected hamster in Mr. Lee’s school science lab ends up biting a student, which unleashes the zombie virus upon the school and city. 

The premise of the Jonas Virus — leeching onto human fear and transforming it into zombie rage — is a fascinating one but disappointingly underdeveloped in the series. One can imagine the various creative paths and adventures this premise could have taken the show, like using the absence of fear in certain characters to explain their resistance towards the virus or exploring possible “cures” to combat the Jonas Virus. Yet, All of Us Are Dead ultimately resorts to a constant stream of narration through grainy videos taken by Mr. Lee in his science lab and barely lit home. In these videos, we listen to him wax lyrical about the ideals of humanity, the monstrosity of evil that the Jonas Virus represents and the inescapable “system of violence” he was not able to save his son from. This turns All of Us Are Dead into a desperate survival show, and somewhere toward the second half of its breathless chase around the school, the 12-episode series begins to lose some of its pace. 

All of Us Are Dead possesses the appeal of high school dramas like Riverdale and Euphoria. It captures in great detail the grotesque violence of high school social dynamics: the relentless gossiping and backstabbing, the unkind politicking and posturing of powerful in-groups and “cool kids,’’ and the festering churn of misery, which falls most heavily on the outcasts. While a few adults do their best to rein in the violence and protect their innocence, the students are largely left to fend for themselves. 

The drama also sketches a wider portrait of society, depicting the chaos of government quarantine facilities and valiant attempts by authorities to cobble together an infection control plan. The implementation of martial law and life-and-death leadership decisions recall South Korea’s fight for democracy in the 1980s. All of Us Are Dead also captures the complex, moral struggle on the streets, where survival demands selfishness, even when the little bit of humanity in everyone implores them to limit harm. The series seems to make a damning pronunciation: enabled by adults, society’s systems of violence have seeped into schools and poisoned what should have been a bastion for moral goodness and innocence.

The power of zombies in fiction resides in their ability to compel our gaze inwards. In All of Us Are Dead, the zombies are teachers, classmates, archery teammates, and even best friends. Yet, in presenting these cruel circumstances, director Lee Jae-kyu’s take on the Korean zombie subgenre has chosen a most hopeful expression. While his predecessors have largely treated the transformation from human to zombie as a quick, crude one to register horror and revulsion, All of Us Are Dead lingers and dawdles on each transition, even for its minor characters. In director Lee’s world, there is something holy and sacred in this intervening space, in between the human and the monstrous, between sentience and savagery, between friend and fiend. 

Many characters, after realizing they have been bitten and are about to turn into a zombie, offer acts of immense self-sacrifice in those precious few seconds before the last of their humanity blinks out into the barbaric darkness. One student throws himself at an onrushing group of zombies to protect his friends. An infected mother desperately ties herself to a door so that she will not cause harm to her baby after she turns. Another offers himself as a distraction to the zombie horde to buy survivors time to run away. Others wave tearful goodbyes as they distance themselves from their peers.

By repeatedly and earnestly holding space for both major and minor characters to demonstrate their humanity, All of Us Are Dead distinguishes its focus. This, combined with the drama-filled high school setting, helps the show carve out its own space in the crowded zombie pantheon. At the same time, it recalls the hallowed battle song that all great tales and stories possess: that we all inhabit both light and dark, good and bad, and that even in the direst of circumstances, we have the ability — and responsibility — to act in the interests of others.

All of Us Are Dead starts streaming on Netflix on January 28th.

Although Dr. Brain stumbles through its world-building at times, there is something deeply bold and profoundly ambitious in this first Korean original series on Apple TV Plus. Dr. Brain takes off as a six-episode thriller starring Lee Sun-kyun (of Parasite fame) as neuroscientist Dr. Koh Se-won. It’s an encouraging start for the streamer’s Korean debut, though the show doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of its fascinating premise and excellent cast.

We are first introduced to Dr. Koh as a young kid on the autism spectrum, struggling to understand emotions and relate to others. He is unfortunately labeled as a problem child in school, which becomes an enormous burden for his single mother. Bringing him to doctors, the (exorbitant) treatments offered don’t quite seem to work the way she hopes for. Growing up with a propensity to “take things apart to see what is inside,” Dr. Koh dives into brain research, which allows him to study the human mind and get a glimpse of how others experience the world. Presenting his research and experiments at conferences, he is portrayed as a relatively successful scientist — albeit one whose ideas are unsettling to his peers. This introduction then takes a dark, abrupt turn as Dr. Koh suffers a series of horrific personal tragedies in quick succession. Increasingly desperate to unearth what happened, he personally tests his research by undergoing “brain syncs” with the dead to pry open their memories for clues. 

Dr. Brain is a genre-bending piece of work, dancing between crime thriller, science fiction, and, most poignantly, a family drama. The series’ best work is in its portrait of grief, sketching Dr. Koh’s private moments as ones of anguish and gradual reckoning with his own flaws and missteps. There is a saying in academia that all research is in some part autobiographical and this rings true for Dr. Koh. His “brain sync” research becomes both a form of mourning and a type of searching, as he realizes that there is something more sinister behind the tragedies. 

Lee Sun-kyun delivers an appropriately reserved performance, getting the balance just right between playing an aloof neuroscientist and a traumatized, bereaved man seeking answers. His colleague, Dr. Hong Nam-il (Lee Jae-won), blossoms over the series, portraying a depth of character that far outdoes what the script offers him. As police officer Lieutenant Choi, Seo Ji-hye (from the immensely popular Crash Landing On You) offers a refreshing steadiness throughout the series. 

There are unshakeable marks of Inception echoing through the six episodes, as characters wander through altered realities and layers of consciousness. Dr. Brain is most intriguing when its characters are unsure whether other people they are seeing are real or figments from a glitchy brain sync. Although the show fumbles through the details of the brain sync mechanism, the central story of Dr. Koh’s search for truth and redemption is resoundingly coherent. Which makes it all the more disappointing that the more philosophical explorations in Dr. Brain — on neurodiversity, ethics in brain research, and the concept of the self — are half-baked. Additionally, its treatment of female characters feels disconcertingly underdeveloped. They’re often left with little agency, abruptly enter and exit the narrative, and are ultimately relegated as untidy footnotes. With its uneven pace over six episodes, there is a gnawing sense that Dr. Brain could have been truly great if its supporting characters and theories were more deeply fleshed out. 

For example, though it never examines this fully, Dr. Brain hints at some of the most complex moral dilemmas in technology that we’re really only beginning to truly interrogate. It is gravely disturbing to see Dr. Koh lurking around the morgue to find a corpse to test out his brain sync technology or hook himself up with a cat (!!) in the name of (hopefully) solving a crime. There is a fine balance between being a user of technology and being used by technology. Here is where the concept of brain syncs in the show carries some real-life parallels. How much of ourselves do we share via technology — and do we even have control over what and how much is shared? What does privacy mean in this digital age? Can the methods of technological advancement be justified as long as the outcomes are “good”? 

These questions are all the more poignant given the fact that the show is backed by one of the biggest technology companies in the world. There is perhaps a meta-critique here somewhere about the relationship between Apple and its users and whether our lives have really been made better by its products. Perhaps the conclusion that the show offers us is one of stubborn ambivalence toward technology: Dr. Koh’s use of brain sync technology (somewhat ironically) allows him to experience the richness of life, in all of its emotions, joys and sorrows, more than he ever could without it. Yet, this comes at a cost. He sometimes suffers from an information overload and his personality changes when reality and technology start to blur. 

Seasoned writer-director Kim Jee-woon has helmed critically acclaimed Korean classics like The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008) and Korea’s first Warner Brothers-funded film The Age of Shadows (2016). There are flashes of brilliance throughout the series, particularly in its seamless, well-timed use of flashbacks — a storytelling tool that too often feels abused nowadays. On one level, his sleek transitions between past and present fittingly capture the unsettled mind of Dr. Koh. On another, these shifts in time provide an absorbingly suspenseful experience for the viewer, especially in the last few episodes. This works in the show’s favor, as Apple TV Plus will drop episodes of Dr. Brain one at a time, weekly through December 10th.

Based on the popular Korean webtoon of the same name, Dr. Brain premiered on November 4th, coinciding with Apple TV Plus’ launch in the Korean market. Though Dr. Brain might feel like a slow start for Apple, it is perhaps helpful to remember that not too long ago, Netflix debuted its first Korean original series Love Alarm to rather disappointing, less-than-illustrious reviews. However, the platform has since developed a prolific portfolio of Korean shows winning both critical and commercial acclaim, most notably with the breakout success of Squid Game. Despite its shortcomings, Dr. Brain offers a promising, hopeful glimpse of Apple TV Plus’ vision for its future projects in Korea and a veritable challenge to other streamers in the market.