SWEET HOME Season One
Tower block of terror
UK/US Netflix, streaming now
Directors Young-woo Jang,
Eung-bok Lee
Cast Song Kang, Lee Jin-wook, Lee Si-young, Lee Do-hyun
What’s scarier: being attacked by a monster, or slowly transforming into one yourself? This 10-part Korean horror show takes a familiar zombie-style premise and ups the stakes by adding gloopy monsters. But after a strong start, it falls foul of every dull survival horror cliché by the end of its second episode, and never recovers.
That first episode is a banger, though. After his whole family is killed in a horrific traffic accident, depressed teen Hyun-soo (Song Kang) moves into the dilapidated Green Home tower block… just in time to spend the end of the world trapped with its assortment of creepy residents.
You see lots of different creature designs right off the bat, and as the monsters were clearly once human, every single creepy resident becomes a potential monster in the making. The sprawling ensemble cast means there’s plenty of conflict – beyond Hyun-soo, there’s mysterious gun-for-hire Sang-wook (Lee Jin-wook), bossy medical student Eun-hyuk (Lee Do-hyun), kickass firefighter Yi-kyeong Lee Si-young), katana-toting man of God Jae-heon (Kim Nam-hee), and about a dozen more – but before long, most of their individual character motivations blur into a common struggle for survival. Then it’s just people wandering around in the dark and bickering over supplies. For hours.
If this show had been written in mid-2020, it’d seem almost too literal. But it wasn’t, and its metaphor is muddled: one moment the show’s explaining that the monsters are supernatural in origin, not the result of a contagion; the next, survivors are building a makeshift quarantine area and checking each other’s temperatures. Somewhere in here there’s an interesting existential conundrum, but it’s one that probably would’ve been better served as a tight 90-minute movie.
The original 141-chapter Sweet Home web comic (ongoing when the show was made) has racked up over 1.2 billion views.