Meet your new South Korean TV crush
“Dr. Brain” has not received the launch that you might expect for a miniseries made by a significant South Korean filmmaker, Kim Jee-woon, or one that marks Apple TV+’s first original series from that country. And it’s hard not to suspect that Netflix’s South Korean smash hit “Squid Game” had something to do with it. Maybe someone at Apple woke up and said, “Hey, we’ve got one of those, too!”
And “Dr. Brain,” in its relatively quiet and only slightly sensational way, is better than “Squid Game.”
Quiet and unsensational are not qualities always associated with Kim, who was happy to engage in excesses of gore or hyperbolic action in movies like “I Saw the Devil” and “The Good, the Bad, the Weird.” In “Dr. Brain,” he’s operating in a calmer, subtler mode reminiscent of his best work, the polished horror film “A Tale of Two Sisters.”
“Dr. Brain,” Kim’s first TV series, is a mystery that follows a brain scientist, Sewon Koh (Lee Sun-kyun), searching for the son he thought he buried but who may be alive.
But it’s also a science fiction story: Koh has developed a process for “syncing brain waves,” allowing him to tap into the memories of the recently dead. The fate of his son is wrapped up with a conspiracy involving this technology. And that’s before you get to the sequences in which Koh goes inside the heads of murder victims, random corpses and, in one droll sequence, a dead cat. That may make “Dr. Brain” sound like a mess, but it’s surprisingly coherent, as well as classy and absorbing entertainment. Details: 6 episodes; available now on Apple TV+.