Reading Time: 4 minutes

Spoiler Alert. Watch Hellbound before reading this. It’s a six-episode investment, somewhere between a long movie and a short series in length, currently on Netflix at the time of this post.

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You came back! You made it through the hellbound incinerations, live cremation, and infanticide. Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of the horror genre, and the movie has some genuinely appalling scenes. I chose to watch it because I was impressed with Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan, ostensibly a zombie movie with a clever ending, but ultimately a film about sacrifice for others (not of others). I’m not a fan of the zombie genre either, but the movie came highly recommended, and I was not disappointed. So I took a chance on Hellbound.

An unwritten rule of monster movies is to progressively reveal the monster, saving the full power and horror until the big confrontation at the movie’s climax. But in the opening scene of Hellbound, the agents of hell fully reveal themselves. They burn their victim to a smoking crisp after a chase scene down the city’s crowded streets in broad daylight with plenty of gratuitous collateral damage, necessary for sheer entertainment value and unambiguously revealing the hellbound threat to the populace at large. Throughout the movie, the modus operandi of the agents of hell remains consistent: An angel in the form of a large face appears and issues a decree of the time of death. The monsters show up at the appropriate time, wreak mayhem, and a bloody, burning demise to the decreed victim. The demons never change in form or capability. Only the venue and the victim change.

In the first three episodes, knowledge of the attacks circulates through social media and the news. Jeong Jin-Soo rises to power and orchestrates the rise of New Truth, the religious cult that imparts moral significance to the decrees. As the high priest of the New Truth, Jeong Jin-Soo puts his practitioners on a mission to expose the wrongdoings of the condemned, hoping to discover the misdeeds that led to his undisclosed decree to hell as an innocent child. Ultimately, he knows the attacks have no meaning but believes humanity is better off with the illusion of meaning rather than the anxiety of not understanding that afflicted his life. New Truth grows in power using the street justice of the fanatical Arrowheads, dedicated to exposing and shaming the decreed, watching the final judgment dispatched dispassionately behind faceless masks. Jin Kyeong-hoon, dressed like something out of a Mad Max movie, incites the fanaticism of the Arrowheads through his rant casts on the internet. The Arrowheads beat lawyer Min Hyejin to within an inch of her life for the crime of opposing the new order, and New Truth defeats detective Jin Kyeong-hoon, who chooses not to expose the truth of Jeong Jin-Soo’s unrevealed decree and hellbound death. Following the rules of progressive disclosure, Yeon Sang-ho’s monsters of sanctimonious self-righteousness and fanaticism start to reveal themselves.

In the last three episodes, we jump forward five years to the indoctrination of New Truth into society. Jeong Jin-Soo has left his legacy in the incompetent hands of the buffoonish mob leader who understands power but not purpose. The New Truth has little to do with factual truth. New Truth uses the police to enforce their moral authority, only employing the Arrowheads as a last resort. New Truth exposes or manufactures the sins of the condemned and wrecks the lives of all those associated with them. Yeon Sang-ho’s twin monsters are in plain sight with the names New Truth and Arrowheads.

Min Hyejin returns to lead an insurgency. She spent the last five years doing martial arts training so she could kick some monster ass and concealing decrees and hellbound executions to protect the families and friends of the condemned. In possibly the most hellish scene, New Truth live incinerates one of Min Hyejin’s co-conspirators in a crematorium oven.
When an angel delivers a hellbound decree to an infant, everything comes to a head. New Truth stops at nothing to protect their moral authority, attempting to conceal the hellbound execution of the undeniably innocent victim. Min Hyejin convinces the parents of the doomed baby to broadcast the performance on social media, using the reformed fanatic Jin Kyeong-hoon’s help and equipment. Jin Kyeong-hoon joined the insurgency when he received a decree of hellbound death, which coincidently will occur five minutes after the baby. But once a fanatic, always a fanatic. New Truth convinces him that the divine has given him the sacred task of ensuring the baby’s death before his own to make it look like the monsters were only after him, thereby preserving their moral authority. Using logic only available to fanatics, he believes that god has ordered him to hell to save heaven, and killing the baby before the monsters arrive is the only reasonable course of action.

In the final chaotic scene, the progressive disclosure comes to its peak. The full power of the monsters is on display. All the human and hellish nightmares combine for the final battle to kill the decreed infant. Min Hyejin and the parents combat Jin Kyeong-hoon and the hellbound monsters to save the infant while the residents and the world stand silently in judgment, neither fleeing nor helping.

Finally, Yeon Sang-ho slays the beasts as appropriate for any decent monster movie. Miraculously, the self-sacrificing parents prevail at the cost of their own lives, finally revealing the Real Truth to the world. The demons dispatch Jin Kyeong-hoon to the underworld. Sanctimonious self-righteousness, fanaticism, and indifference are the monsters. To paraphrase the dialog, “The Hellbound attacks are no different than the randomness of any natural disaster. The affairs of humans are the business of humans.” Moral judgment doesn’t come from the divine. Incineration by natural disasters is a tragedy. Incineration of humans by humans, infanticide, and just making people’s lives miserable are the horrific crimes.

The monsters are gone, at least for the moment, but I hope Yeon Sang-ho doesn’t make a sequel to Hellbound. He has taken on monsters, superheroes, and zombies. His sequel should turn another staid subgenre of fantasy on its head. How about vampires?

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Spoiler Alert. Watch My Mister before reading any of this. It’s worth the sixteen-hour+ investment. I will wait.

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You came back! You made it through the slow-moving, depressing series I sent you off to watch. It’s not your typical K-drama with some crazy premise like time travel, alternate worlds, or dead spirits that can’t make it to the real afterlife because of a grudge. My Mister has none of this. It is set in an ordinary neighborhood, with ordinary people, with normal if not downright mundane lives. Realism pervades the story in the community, the workplace, the hangouts, the subway, the buses, and the homes.

While there is plenty of drama at the executive level with principals jockeying for power, the work itself has almost no consequence. It’s simply a device to extol the virtues and showcase the integrity of Dong-hoon. He cares about the integrity of the work and the people that work for and with him. For example, when the drone fails, Dong-hoon, the senior manager at the site, puts himself at risk by climbing up the water tower to take the necessary pictures to analyze the structure.

The story is barely alive as the two protagonists, Lee Ji-an and Dong-hoon, stand apart waiting for the subway to arrive, sit apart, or are uncomfortably squeezed together at rush-hour congestion. They never walk side-by-side down the road where they split off into their respective neighborhoods. Lee Ji-an spends more time staring at the ground than any other character. Sometimes, my Hollywood brain wants to scream at them to say something, say anything to each other.

Shame on me for those moments of weakness. I watch K-dramas because they break the mainstream mold, not despite it. And nothing breaks that mold better than My Mister. No brains splattered, plot twists sure, but not every thirty seconds like we have the attention span of a one-year-old, no witty and triumphant repartee while slaying people that so obviously deserve to die.

My Mister is an exercise in everyday life rather than an escape from it. Sang-hoon says with all seriousness, “My one and only goal is to leave the house and drink.” Dong-hoon video records his exceptional talent for his son, which consists of dumping shot glasses full of soju into beer glasses lined up to make somaek.

What is not ordinary is Dong-hoon’s integrity. He is a moral superhero. He never maligns anyone or does anyone wrong throughout the whole story. He has no moral chink in his armor. His behavior is impeccable from start to finish. If he has a flaw, it is his flawlessness. He protects the dignity of those he knows are hurting or hurting him and consequently hurts himself more. He doesn’t confront Yoon-hee when he knows she is cheating on him but tries to persuade Do Yun to dump her to maintain her dignity. He doesn’t bring up the subject of Gyumduk, his one-time best friend to Jung-hee, Gyumduk’s spurned lover, even though he misses him, which he ultimately acknowledges with the one-word response, yes, which for him is a tsunami of talk and emotion. He carries grandma up the stairs and fights Lee Ji-an’s tormenter. He gets up for a lady on the subway even though he is injured and hurting.

He is a knight in shiny armor, but he hates his life. To his family, he is the winner of the group, the only brother with a real job, and a beautiful, loving, and successful wife. In reality, he is stuck as a low-level manager subservient to his one-time subordinate turned CEO, who also is having an affair with his wife. He lives within walls of his own making, and it’s not entirely clear if Yoon-hee’s infidelity is one of the causes or one of the symptoms.

Lee Ji-an is no moral slouch either. Even though she is willing to throw two full-time employees under the bus for a manipulative and fearful boss, she does it to pay off a manufactured debt from the vengeful Lee Kwang-il and care for her disabled grandmother Lee Bong-ae. Her empathy towards her assailant, Kwang-il, inspires his compassion, the last piece of the puzzle required to put Do-Yun away for good. But I think Ji-an’s superpower is her ability to read and understand people’s motives far beyond the capabilities of even an older adult. She plays a CEO, an attorney, and even the entire corporate staff of Saman E&C. But if Dong-Hoon has walls, Lee Ji-an’s walls have walls.

Lee Ji-an’s omnipresent wiretap and round-the-clock monitoring penetrate Dong-Hoon’s walls, albeit without his permission or knowledge. There is nothing she doesn’t know about him, and it is all absolutely genuine because he doesn’t know that she is watching over him. Dong-Hoon’s impeccable morality breaks down Lee Ji-an’s walls, always supporting her, even after his understanding of her transgressions escalates. So the dual protagonists dance this tango throughout the plot, slowly bringing the light to Lee Ji-an’s face and life to Dong-hoon’s day.

They become more intertwined in each other’s lives, and both intuit the absolute necessity of the other, becoming not lovers and far more than drinking buddies or colleagues or acquaintances. They become friends.

And that is what I think is the point of this story. The story is a recipe for being happy in a world of friends. I think the hypothesis of the movie comes from grandma when she signs, “If you think about it, each interpersonal relationship is quite fascinating and precious. You must repay them. Live a happy life. That’s how you can repay the people in your life.” The most important symbol in the movie comes at the very end when after everything they have done for one another, Dong-Hoon and Lee Ji-an shake hands. They become happy, not for themselves, but because they owe it to the other.

In romantic relationships, we say, “You make me happy.” Or if you are less fortunate, maybe you say, “You don’t.” The burden is on each person to make the other happy as if love is some mutually beneficial monetary transaction. The story has something to say about this arrangement. As much as my Hollywood brain demands a romance, it was never in the cards. First, note the age difference. Dong-hoon is a 48-year-old man. Jee Li-an is a 21-year-old woman.

Second, note the lack of one single, successful romantic relationship in the whole story. Not one. Dong-hoon and Yoon-hee’s marriage is in tatters from the very beginning. She cheats with the person he hates the most. “Why him?” Dong asks. “Why him of all people?” Because Do-Yun manipulates people to get what he wants. He dates married women because “You can trust a married person to keep a secret.” Yoon-hee chooses romance over family and friends. She wants the one, and she wants to be special. She buys into the mutually reciprocal nuclear relationship that Do-Yun represents. The nukes end up doing what nukes do when she discovers that Do-Yun’s interest in her isn’t entirely so mutual. A romantic relationship places the burden of happiness on the other person. Grandma’s friendship places the burden on your obligation to your friends. Even though Dong-hoon and Yoon-hee make their peace, they never get back together romantically, and she leaves Korea to be with their son in America.

In the relationship between Sang-hoon and Ae-ryun, they went the other way. Sang-hoon hangs on to the thought, but there is nothing between them throughout the story. Ae-ryun keeps the family but gives up the romantic relationship. She still shows up for a beer at the bar and drinks with all of them. Sang-hoon sleeps on the floor with his brother in his mother’s house while Ae-ryun has moved into her place.

Jung-hee wears the long-dead relationship with the Buddhist monk, Gyumduk, like cement water shoes. Jung-hee has wasted her adult life commiserating over him. She fakes happiness and independence with her night walks to her place, which is the bar she just left but never actually leaves. Everyone sees through it. She finally emancipates herself and her friends when everyone at the bar is allowed to say his name without her breaking down in remorseful tears or an unconscious stupor. He makes his peace with her, but they never reconcile. His only barrier to happiness is that he didn’t have the strength to stop by and see her after the breakup. It only takes him twenty-some-odd years and punishing meditation for getting it right.

The most bizarre relationship of all is Ki-hoon and Yoo-ra. Yoo-ra bases the relationship on Ki-hoon’s admission that he took out his inadequacies on her, making her feel good to see him as the failure instead of herself. Ki-hoon shows compassion for her in brief but generally unrewarded spurts. The best line between them is when Ki-hoon says, “I love you.” She responds, “That doesn’t help.” As much as I wanted to scream at the TV to make their relationship happen, in the end, I would have yelled at the writer if he had done it any other way.

And that’s it for the relationships. Bong-ae (Li-an’s grandmother) and Yo-soon (the mom) have no husbands. Choon-dae (the trashman) has no wife. No one in the office has a relationship on display. No one in the neighborhood drags their wives along to the soccer games or the bar.

The story creates intimacy among the characters through daily consumption of alcohol, by sharing the anxiety and frustration of friends, reveling in their successes as if they were their own, taking up arms at the sight of a bloody comrade, and sometimes even making extraordinary gestures, like when Sang-hoon uses up all his money to give grandma a decent funeral. Despite all their bickering and disappointments, they have genuine intimacy and decency towards one another.

The romantic realm is filled with demands, deceit, disappointment, and failed expectations.
The boy doesn’t get the girl, and not every story has to be a love story. So, in the end, the story’s recipe for happiness is through friendship earned through intimacy and decency. For every action of decency, you owe a debt of happiness. And I find that entirely refreshing and useful.