It’s only been a few weeks since we last saw Lee Dong-wook (Reach of Sincerity) on our screens, but we can expect to see him back in dramaland before the year is out. He has confirmed he’ll be joining Im Shi-wan (The King Loves) in the OCN thriller Hell Is Other People. The drama is a webtoon adaptation that will examine the ways people clash and their capability to outright torment others.
Im Shi-wan will play a country boy who decides to move to the big city, Seoul. Once in Seoul, he moves into a rundown gositel (think super budget dormitory, but not restricted to students) and the horrors begin when he meets and interacts with his fellow gositel residents. Lee Dong-wook will be playing an artistic and sensitive dentist who happens to work and live near the gositel. He eventually takes Im Shi-wan under his wing in order to show him how to adapt to city life.
Hell Is Other People will be the second installation in OCN’s new “Dramatic Cinema” project, which aims to combine the best elements of dramas and cinema (that also means fewer episodes than your average drama). The source material was known for managing to shock readers with psychological twists, and considering that it’s OCN, I see a lot of potential for creepy thrills and chills.
PD Lee Chang-hee (The Vanished) will helm the project with Jung Yi-do writing. Jung Yi-do wrote Rescue Me, but worryingly, he was also the main scriptwriter for Item… So I have no idea what kind of quality to expect from him. The drama is scheduled to air in the second half of 2019 on OCN.