Part horror monster story and part something akin to a heist drama, Gyeongseong Creature is a tale about human experimentation set during the Japanese occupation. Park Seo-joon and Han So-hee form the core of a ragtag team who set out on a mission of their own and uncover a much bigger, more disturbing plot along the way. While the story is engaging and at times thrilling, the uneven pacing and underdeveloped characters keep it from reaching its full potential.
EPISODES 1-7
Gyeongseong Creature is a dark, brutal exploration of colonization and what it means to be human. The story takes place in 1945 during the final years of the Japanese occupation. Desperate to turn the tide of the war, Japan’s military undertakes a secret mission. They kidnap and experiment on Koreans as they strive to create the perfect monster they can unleash on their enemies. But creating a controllable, fully functioning monster isn’t so easy. Unfortunately, they crack the code when they find a female prisoner who is able to integrate with one of their “najin” – a tiny worm-like creature that burrows into the brain and mutates the body.
The plight of Koreans during the occupation is front and center in this drama with various forms of brutality by the Japanese soldiers regularly on display. Koreans are tortured, kidnapped, and killed with little to no provocation. Horror is a natural medium to explore this dark period of history, making the stripping of humanity literal through the human experimentation at the core of the story.
The experimentation serves as the first plotline of our intersecting story. The second starts when a young Korean woman, mistress to a high up Japanese official, goes missing. Locally famous pawnshop owner JANG TAE-SANG (Park Seo-joon) is brought in to help find her. Used treasures aren’t the only things that pass through his shop; he’s also the area’s most notorious information broker. Knowing his life is at stake if he refuses or doesn’t succeed, Tae-sang has no choice but to throw himself into the task.
Luckily for Tae-sang, two “sleuths” known for missing persons investigations come into town. YOON CHAE-OK (Han So-hee) and her father YOON JOONG-WON (Jo Han-chul) are searching for a Japanese painter named SACHIMOTO (Woo Ji-hyun) who might know something about Chae-ok’s mom who disappeared a decade ago. Tae-sang needs their prowess and they need his local intel. It’s a match made in heaven, even if it gets off to a bumpy start.
All roads lead our team to Onseong Hospital where the disturbing experiments are taking place. Keeping a dangerous creature in a dingy cell underground goes about as well as you’d expect. But the experiment is worth some dead soldiers and heaps of dead prisoners, apparently. With some help from others sympathetic to the cause, including Tae-sang’s secret independence-fighting friend KWON JOON-TAEK (Wie Ha-joon) and Sachimoto, the crew gains access to the Japanese-only hospital and begins exploring what’s going on in the creepy basement.
It’s not smooth sailing for our crew – character differences lead to some conflicts along the way. Chae-ok’s idealism and empathic approach instantly clashes with Tae-sang’s pragmatic survivalism. He worked his way up from the streets as an orphan and built himself into a man whose wealth and knowledge lend him some level of protection. He’s no idealist, and his only goal is to take care of himself and his few friends. Chae-ok, on the other hand, is the stubborn and idealistic type who wants to save everyone she sees and bristles at Tae-sang and his selfish ways.
Despite the conflict between Tae-sang’s desire to survive and Chae-ok’s desire to help others, Tae-sang is smitten with her pretty much from the start. That combined with the fact that he’s more caring than he likes to pretend means she usually wins any argument. This brings us to the weakest aspect of this story: the romance. It’s not a huge part of the story, and I have no idea why the drama even bothered seeing as there’s no development whatsoever, so the suggested feelings seem to be conjured out of thin air.
I think part of the issue is that Chae-ok’s character is underdeveloped, particularly in comparison to Tae-sang. Her primary character motivation is finding her mother, which is fine, except it’s basically her entire personality. And they don’t even give us much in the way of flashbacks or anecdotes to establish their relationship. Consequently, Chae-ok comes off as bland and her character falls emotionally flat. Seeing as her connection to her mom is core to the emotional angle of the drama, that’s a problem.
On the whole, the drama is well-made and has a cinematic flair, giving it a strong sense of atmosphere and styling. However, for a drama billed as horror suspense, the pacing felt off. We spend a lot of time with the setup, planning, and sneaking around which kills the suspense at times. Our protagonists don’t even face the creature until the fourth episode. I think the drama’s length is to its detriment – I almost feel this would’ve been better as a movie where the pacing could’ve been more even and the story tighter. In general, nothing is surprising or hard to guess here, mostly because we’re given the revelations too early. Since we know what is going on before the protagonists, it’s less suspense and more waiting for them to catch up. This undercut some of the more emotional moments like when Chae-ok finds out what happened to her mom long after the audience does. Had we found out with her, certain scenes would’ve been much more powerful.
That said, Gyeongseong Creature is by no means a bad drama; it’s just not as gripping as it should be. I like a lot of the elements – the setting, themes, and overall plot are compelling – but something is missing emotionally for me. The characters, aside from Tae-sang and a couple of others like Joon-taek and Tae-sang’s right-hand woman MRS. NA-WOL (played by the consistently good Kim Hae-sook), come off as two-dimensional and underdeveloped. But I’m genuinely curious how the story ends and will absolutely be tuning into the final three episodes, especially given they left us on a cliffhanger with one of our leads in grave danger and a second possible monster on the horizon.