Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Brain-hacking is the key to this South Korean mystery
It’s a whodunit. It’s a medical procedural. It’s science fiction. It’s film noir! It’s a bloodstained rendition of the old song “Thanks for the Memory”!
It’s all that, and it’s called “Dr. Brain,” now on Apple TV+. With “Squid Game” now officially Netflix’s most-watched series, Apple TV+ has hustled its own South Korean property into international circulation.
“Dr. Brain” comes from a webtoon, aka digital comic, and the six-part limited series will make new episodes available each Thursday. The story literalizes the idea of how we carry memories of others around with us, in a procedure involving hacking into people’s brains to access memories for the purposes of mystery-solving. The “brain sync” sequences, in which our quietly obsessive brain scientist hero hacks into the noggin of his comatose wife or (my favorite) a dead cat, drip with visual possibilities. Creator and director Kim Jee-woon imagines each unauthorized neurological experiment a little differently, just as Martin Scorsese handled each boxing match in “Raging Bull” differently.
The final two episodes of “Dr. Brain” may frustrate the give-it-to-me-straightno-more-dream-sequences-please crowd. But as a genre mashup, and craftsmanship, the series is super-sleek, very violent and pretty sharp.
It’s also blithely unafraid of imperiling its child characters early and often, handing the key character a lifetime’s worth of internalized anguish in the first 20 minutes. After witnessing the brutal death of his mother, the specially gifted future brain researcher Sewon Koh (Lee Sun-kyun) grows up to suffer even greater losses. His five-year-old son, who lies somewhere on the autism spectrum like his father, dies in a mysterious explosion. Sewon’s wife (Lee Yoo-Young) becomes another casualty of sorts. The trailer keeps few secrets regarding the foul play underneath it all, and the larger conspiracy bubbling in “Dr. Brain.”
A snarling private detective (Park Hee-soon) starts nosing into Sewon’s affairs, bringing up what Sewon has known all along: that his wife had an affair with another man. But is Sewon’s son truly dead? The series progresses from brain sync to brain sync, with Sewon mining the memories of his wife, and others, for clues to what really happened to his family. As Sewon conducts more and more unauthorized procedures, his own mind becomes an unreliable blur of other people’s memories. Sewon has his own cerebral ways of crime solving, in every sense of that word; the police have theirs.
“Just when you think you know a thing or two, you die,” says one prominent character (no spoilers!) who dreams of sustaining his legacy well into the future. “Dr. Brain” may think it’s saying something larger and more philosophically provocative than that (it isn’t), but it works without an extra dimension of meaning. Whole sections of “Dr. Brain” are silly as hell, but to paraphrase the old song: You might’ve been a headache. But you never were a bore.
TV rating: TV-MA Running time: Six episodes, about six hours total How to watch: Now streaming on Apple TV+ (new episodes each Thursday)