It’s finally happened again! I found a K-Drama that I love enough to want to enthusiastically recommend it to all and sundry despite its (very few, very small) flaws. It combines two of my favourite things: monsters and great music–and is therefore more greatly beloved. I’ve tried to figure out exactly why it is that I love monster stories So Very Much–is it the high stakes? the way pretence is stripped away from real life so that only what’s real remains? the different ways characters are able to show bravery? the way monsters are usually combined with real life?–and I still don’t have real answer.
All I know is that by the time the camera was panning over the breath-taking sight of monsters free ranging in the cityscape outside the apartment block where our heroes are trapped, with Imagine Dragons’ Warriors howling in the background, I was well and truly hooked. I already knew it was my bag–monsters!–but I hadn’t expected how very good the sound track would be. I’m currently writing to that soundtrack most days; it elevated an already amazing series from being heart-wrenching and thought-provoking to breath-taking and tear-inducing as well.
What is this glorious series, you ask? It’s the Korean series Sweet Home, the first season of which is on Netflix and has ten hour-long episodes. I’m currently waiting with bated breath to know that there will be a second–and for those who, like me, may not be able to wait, it’s based on a webtoon that actually is complete. Whether or not you can find it in English, however, is entirely another matter.
the basic premise
The residents of Green Home Apartment Building wake up one morning to discover that the lower floor is entirely shut up; lock, stock, and barrel. They can’t get out.
Someone unknown, for reasons unknown, has separated the residents of Green Home from the world outside, and they have no intention of letting them get out. The half of our protagonist group that is on the bottom floor spend almost the entire first episode just trying to get out and then discovering that…maybe they don’t want to.
Up on the higher floors, the other half of our protagonist group, comprised of a suicidal young man, a gangster ballet girl, an actual gangster bloke, and the coolest old bloke with a hard-wired crutch are all variously discovering that something big and nasty and bloody is roaming the halls. And that something may have come from one of their apartments.
To my joy, there are as many female as male characters, and they are all people! Not all strong in the same way, but allowed to have their own story in their own way. I loved being able to contrast the physical strength of one of the girls with the mental and spiritual strength of one of the others. Unlike many kdramas, the female characters aren’t relegated to the background, and they aren’t forced to be butt-kickers to be acknowledged.
the monsters
Don’t get me wrong. The monsters are both amazing and terrifying: I caught my breath several times, something which rarely happens with me. They were very well done in terms of CGI in my opinion.
However. The most terrifying thing about these monsters is that they were each, one and all, once humans. It’s not too much of a spoiler; you discover it pretty quickly. But this chilling fact leads on very quickly to another discovery–namely, that anyone in the building is liable to turn at any minute, and no-one knows why, or how, or if it can be stopped. Is it infectious? Is it rage? Can it be stopped once it starts? What does one do in order to survive and protect the people one loves when one of the group starts to turn monster?
As Twenty-One Pilots says in Ride— “Would you ever kill?”
That’s the truly terrifying proposition here.
the problems
For me, there are very few problems with this series, but there are a few problems. The first one is that if you don’t care for bad language, you’re going to have to look away from the screen a few times. The translation team often translated an f-word where one didn’t exist, but every now and then it didn’t translate one that was there, so it runs fairly even. There is definitely bad language in this one, and slightly more in English than there would be in Korean, due to some of the swears being automatically worse in English than the Korean counterpart.
The second problem is all with the editing: there were several episodes where it felt as though a chunk of story was just…missing. Characters got from up on the top floor to the bottom floor with no problem and no onscreen representation of the same, although we know it’s hard and dangerous to do it. Little things didn’t quite match up. At first, I thought this was a clue, and due to a few different things that also might have been clues, had a conspiracy theory to go along with it: turns out it was either just bad editing or perhaps there are cut scenes after the credits that Netflix cut off before I saw them. I’m going to do a rewatch so I know which it was.
overall
This was a solid, riveting watch for me: I finished it in a few days, even trying to pace myself. It wasn’t just that it was solid: it caught my heart and soul and dragged me in, made me love the characters, and killed some of those characters. No one is safe from death; no one is safe from turning monster. No one knows what will happen.
And I loved every gloriously soundtracked second of it. 100/10 recommend. (BTW, check out the Imagine Dragon’s song I linked above: it’s also a trailer for the series, and it’s a pretty good indicator of what to expect.)
I read it and thought “Oh yeah, when I’ve studied enough, I’ll be confident to go to this and practise speaking aloud. I wonder when it starts?” Checked the date. Their first lesson was that night. Ah. But I was working that night and also desperately nervous.