captivating and delightfully macabre killer thriller

At one point in the-frog”>The Frog, defeated and despairing motel owner Gu Sang-jun (Yoon Kye-sang) tells the newly minted police officer Yoon Bo-min (Ha Yoon-kyung and Lee Jung-eun) to never be the “frog”. He compares the frog to an innocent bystander who gets hit by a stone. As it bleeds out by a cruel design of fate, the frog wonders who threw the stone and why it had to hit him. “Why me?” is a question that comes up often in the K-drama – at its core, The Frog is a story mired in helplessness, told through the perspectives of unsuspecting, ordinary people who meet evil by happenstance and find their lives cruelly upended.

Two stories run parallel in Netflix’s latest K-drama offering, both focusing on the trickle-down impact of two motel owners meeting two serial killers. In 2001, well-meaning Gu Sang-jun insists that a mysterious man spend the night in his motel, only to discover that the man is a serial killer. In 2021, a middle-aged Jeon Yeong-ha (Kim Yoon-seok) welcomes a woman and a child into his vacation rental but wakes up the next day to find her gone, eventually deducing that she’d murdered the child in his home.

The ripple effect of the killers’ horrific actions impacts both these “frogs” in their own way. Sang-jun’s life (and motel) falls apart in excruciatingly public spectacles. At the same time, the reticent and reclusive Yeong-ha quite literally covers up the horrors of the event, cleans the house and moves on with his life until the year after, when the woman – now known as Yoo Seong-a (Go Min-si) – returns, harbouring a sick obsession with his rental house.

Writer Son Ho-young’s captivating story expertly treads the line between a psychological horror and a chilling killer thriller. With a cinematic and borderline art house approach, director Mo Wan-il’s visuals are a feast for the eyes. The alluring Yoo Seong-a is often found in dreamy, almost romantic settings that create a chilling juxtaposition to her malice, while Sang-jun’s bleak, kitchen-sink world is shrouded in dirty greens and blacks. Wan-il wields non-liner and choppy editing like a lethal weapon, intentionally infusing moments of shock and chaos between tranquil introspection.

Anchoring this tale with a delightfully macabre back and forth are Kim Yoon-seok and Go Min-si. Go is the unstoppable force to Kim’s immovable object. Her unhinged, electric energy is calmed by Kim’s stoic perseverance, and their constant struggle to one-up each other is the most enjoyable aspect of the show. In the parallel storyline, Yoon Kye-sang’s transition from motel owner to downtrodden everyman is heartrending. His biggest complement, however, is his dynamic with the serial killer Ji Hyang-cheol (Hong Gi-jun), who offsets Sang-jun’s naive humanity with cold-blooded apathy.

Though, we would have liked to see more of Lee Jung-eun as an elderly Yoon Bo-min. The police officer’s story largely goes underexplored until the latter half of the show – at that point, you’re more likely on the edge of your seat waiting for the other shoe to drop. Despite the fairly tight pacing, viewers might also feel some fatigue during the first half too. But all that’s hardly a deterrent in the grand, bloody scheme of this nail-biting tale. You’ll more than likely get through this in one sitting, clenching your fists and holding your breath – if only to find out what becomes of the struggling, desperate frog.

The Frog is out now exclusively on Netflix.