‘Bargain’ director expands short film into disaster series
New series helps boost Tving’s subscribers
Tving’s new series, “Bargain,” which is adapted from a 2015 award-winning short film of the same name, extends the original plot into a crime, disaster dystopian series.
Filmmaker Lee Chung-hyeon’s short film follows a schoolgirl and a man bargaining for her services as a prostitute.
But it turns out the girl lured him to the motel to steal and sell his organs.
The plot was picked up for a sixpart series, which was released on the streaming platform on Oct. 28. The new series developed the story into what happened after the original short film’s ending. Amid the bargaining, the man, Noh Hyungsoo (Jin Seon-kyu), and the young woman, Park Joo-young (Jun Jongseo), encounter an earthquake and get trapped in the building.
Along with a few other survivors, including Ko Keuk-ryul (Chang Ryul), a customer who was desperate to buy an organ for his father, the two must find a way to survive with no one to trust.
The series scored the highest “unique visitor” counts, the number of subscribers logging in to watch specific content, during the week of its release among all of Tving’s original series, although the platform did not disclose the specific number.
The series’ director, Jeon Woosung, said that he wanted to tell a story of how wrongdoers work through an inevitable disaster.
“I was thinking of doing a disaster piece with a production company when I was offered to make this series … The key here is that all of the characters are villains. So I wanted the story to have an earthquake as a sense of punishment for them and develop into how they get through the situation,” Jeon said during an interview with The Korea Times via video chat, Wednesday.
“You can’t tell which main character is more villainous. But as they face a disaster, it would reset some of the circumstances. And when they start from zero, how would they act and deceive each other? I thought it was interesting to show how they handle the struggles.”
Hyung-soo and Joo-young join forces in the end, each with a different motive. Joo-young tells Hyungsoo that her boss keeps a huge sum of money in a vault and talks him into helping her.
The director noted, “I think this piece is about money and lies. There are few elements that I put in metaphorically … For one, the motel building is a metaphor for capitalism,” adding that he hopes the viewers would enjoy the series regardless of its underlying theme.
“My priority was that I wanted people to simply enjoy the series. My assignment and goal was to create a series that people can just bingewatch,” he said.
Spoiler alert: The series comes to an open ending, where three survivors — Hyung-soo, Joo-young, and Keuk-ryul — face a dystopian world beset by the disaster, after finally getting out of the building.
When asked about a second season, the director said he is open to the idea, yet nothing has been decided.