Daebak K-Rambles

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Re-watch value: 0 out of 5 stars

SYNOPSIS

*From Netflix*

Somebody is a 2022 South Korean psychological thriller television series that follows a software developer drawn into a dark world of romance and murder when a serial killer uses her dating app to find targets.

RAMBLING

*beware of spoilers*

Deeply upsetting and deeply unsettling. It was dark, creepy, disturbing, and wholly unlike other dark thriller K-dramas.

Is it about lust? Mental illness? Murder? The torture of innocent animals? Or is it a twisted love story? The answer is yes. It’s too slippery to define and willfully bucks labels, definitions, and easy categorization. It utilizes so few familiar tropes and writing conventions. The show makes no attempt to aggrandize morality, impart virtues or lessons, nor even to comment on society at large. It feels like it doesn’t care about your entertainment or comfort; it presents this story detached, empty, almost clinically.

It’s impeccably acted, with these performances even crossing the threshold into otherworldly.

The cinematography on this show was atmospheric to the point where it’s detrimental to the viewer. Yes, make a dimly lit show to match the dark tones of the plot and characters, but now, I can’t see a damn thing. I hated that.

The slow pacing and even uncomfortable stillness of the show makes for a watch experience punctuated by heart-pumping gory violence or graphic sex scenes. It forces the viewer to sit with the unbearable dullness and monotony of life, the incessant cog of time, the relentlessly colorless and boring nature of the FL and ML’s lives. So when those moments of peril flash across the screen, you come alive, much as they do.

I found the FL Sum and ML Yun-o insufferable and repulsive in their own ways.

ML Seong Yun-o played by Kim Young-kwang

For the ML, a close manifestation of chaotic evil, we are not shown a backstory, a vibrant home life, or a childhood where he was indeed abandoned by his mother. We can make a hundred different inferences, and they’d all be equally probable. In that sense, his obvious lie about his parents, and in particular his mother, to the FL feels correct in the way that The Dark Knight’s Joker is also perpetually lying about his origins for a similar chaotic evil effect. 

You can’t get a read on him; you can’t reason with him; you can’t even quite understand him. He’s the perfect embodiment of a psychopath serial killer who’d just as likely murder a woman he finds vain, trifling, and obnoxious as he is to toy with a paraplegic female cop who he deems too broken and helpless to bother murdering. She’s just not worth it… although she’s worth expending the enormous energy to lure, trap, and taunt within a demolition zone labyrinth.

He’s persnickety like that. An enigma that feels closer to an animal—a cat that kills rodents but leaves one alive just to play with ad nauseum.

Even the most substantive flashback sequence of his first experience with the Somebody app / his first murder was hard to unpack. He came across like a shy gym bro who was romantically inexperienced. The gag was that this sexual encounter with this random dominant woman could be dissected more easily. He didn’t like being told what to do, didn’t like being intimidated into a threesome, enjoyed strangling her, and his sexual climax happened after he killed her and her body essentially went limp. The second killing of the man who was supposed to be their third was out of necessity. But inside one year, he easily became a prolific serial killer.

Nature vs. nurture is invoked within the show, but in this argument, the show does throw its weight behind the nature argument.

I initially thought the numbers he used as profile names for hijacked Somebody accounts corresponded to the number of people he killed. But I don’t think that was the case.

FL Kim Sum played by Kang Hae-lim

For the FL, I found her immediately off. And true, her Asperger’s syndrome (now officially classified as Level 1 Autism Spectrum Disorder [ASD]) explains much of this. But through flashbacks of her with her mother and her own present-day encounter with the Agape group hunting her down for this elaborate gang rape, you realize she has a penchant for violence and a morbid fascination with murder. She confessed to the Someone AI chatbot that she felt happy, even euphoric, when she killed that one attacker.

Perhaps she is both autistic and a psychopath? Not outside the realm of possibility, but again, the show is not interested in clean labels or diagnosis or hell, even explanation. You don’t get monologuing from characters, opening or closing narration, no third-party character sweeping in with a Psycho-esque explainer.

The show definitely features an imperfect definition of ASD and runs the risk of people who don’t understand Asperger’s coming away with the wrong idea about the disorder. I could even go so far as to say it’s an irresponsible portrayal.

Despite all of this, I was ready to support this character. She’s this lonely autistic woman who built an innovative AI chatbot that would help her make friends, indirectly contribute to group conversations, say what she’s too shy or scared to say, and keep all her deepest thoughts safe in a database. She’s obviously craving human connection despite being robotic herself. 

And that’s her downfall. I lost sympathy for her once she developed feelings for the ML. She keeps him at a strange distance until she reads his deleted messages in Someone: a litany of confessions about wanting her sexually and wanting to commit murder with her. It’s the bizarre confirmation she needs, the arousing stimulant of homicide… 

I further distanced myself from the FL when she continually defends the ML, lying about the connection he has with her two friends (the lesbian shaman and the paraplegic cop), covering his ass, ignoring every red flag including the fact that he orchestrated her gang rape. (A particularly gruesome revelation with the flashback of him maniacally giggling, utterly entertained by the hunt and her distress) She initially seemed betrayed by the Agape revelation, but my interpretation is that she felt more betrayal from his destruction of the Someone AI chatbot in her garage. That seemed more violating and shocking to her.

Oh, so she’s a horrible friend and she doesn’t mind that he’s tried to hurt her.

Why Did She Murder Him?

The transition from her dogged defense of him to her quiet murder of him was never sufficiently explained. She sought answers from the shaman, desperately bringing all the knives she had in her house to amplify her powers. She even thought an exorcism could help. But it seemed Sum was politely strong-armed into joining the Somebody internal investigation, a forensic accounting of his misuse of the app, the users he’s exploited, the isolation of his digital footprint to a separate server, etc. But this was only after the CEO’s threat (to tell Sum about the Agape gang rape plot) didn’t work on Yun-o, as Sum already knew about it.

I wonder if the correct interpretation is that Sum couldn’t allow what happened to the Someone chatbot to happen to her life’s work, the Somebody dating app? The app marketing strategy centered on strict privacy for its many users—a strategy sadly reminiscent of the Nth room scandal within the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Perhaps instead of cooperating with the active police investigations requesting private user data, which would implode their whole model, she chose to preserve the sovereignty of the company, her product, and do away with this threat herself.

The mysterious R&D project Sum seemed to be working on turned out to be AI deepfake technology that utilized the endless supply of user data the company swore they didn’t keep. In a particularly unnerving, eye-twitching part of the finale episode, the tech is deployed to terrorize the ML. He receives calls and text messages from his dead victims. But the CEO shakily points to her own computer screen showing the rendering of a real-time deepfake video call with a dead victim, saying (and I’m paraphrasing), “We can make money from this.”

The weaponization of technology and specifically AI was its own slightly ahead-of-its-time horror. 

Does the ML really like Sum, or perhaps even love her? There are a hundred different maxims that can neatly speak to this, but I came across one just today: “When a good man is in love with you, his biggest fear is hurting you. When a bad man is in love with you, his biggest fear is losing you.” And that’s exactly Yun-o’s attitude: desperate to keep her.

The shocking conclusion with Sum leading the cops and her friend Gi-eun on a virtual wild goose chase, while she murders Yun-o at his remote compound, slicing his eyes first and then his neck? I think it’s brilliant and shocking, even if it’s missing all the pathos. Her AI deepfake on his phone robotically telling him to say that one more time and him gurgling out that he likes her very much, over and over and over and over again… An assaulting visual. 

Supporting Characters

Gi-eun, the wheelchair-bound paraplegic cop, is stupid and confrontational and is in no way believable as a cop. She launches headlong into a half-assed shady one-woman investigation, confronting the ML with no plan or logic to her actions. Her behavior was genuinely baffling and lacking in too much common sense.

On that note, we never find out who the Finger was. This cloaked finger, I mean, figure was operating a black market Somebody info ring from within the server room. It’s sanctioned by the CEO, who walked right by the guy… And that’s about all we know. So is the Somebody CEO selling user info to the highest crypto bidder? Why the finger gimmick?

The shaman Mok-won was the most understandable character in the whole show, and still her profession is both uniquely Korean and entirely odd. The show does believe in shamanism and her mystic powers, as she does accurately pinpoint that Gi-eun’s limpdick-empty-pool-wheelchair-trashing dude is Sum’s boyfriend. She also says she smells incense on the girls when they interact with Yun-o, which ultimately helps them locate Gi-eun stranded in the sprawling rubble.

But there was absolutely no need to include anything about her sexuality. Her trips to the gay bar, her connection with the woman driving the convertible, and even the makeout session and sleepover, with the woman reacting positively to Mok-won’s shaman profession, going so far as to say, “I’ll be your talisman.” These happenings never manifest or culminate in any meaningful way. The sexual partner gives Mok-won validation when we didn’t know or care that she was feeling other, vulnerable, or scared. And the convertible woman is not given a chance to be an important talisman or protection from evil for Mok-won. Mok-won is on the cusp of being a complete person but is reduced to more of a device.

The Ending

This was not copaganda in any sense, but taking a second look at any of the police procedural aspects of the show yields only more confusion. It’s just not smartly constructed or believable at all.

To that end, the show opts not to provide any kind of formal justice for the myriad victims of Yun-o. Instead cosmic (or karmic?) justice is served with his lover—the one he finally met on the same app that brought him his half-life as a serial killer, a new kind of euphoria that replaced his wide-eyed optimism—killing him.

It’s not particularly satisfying… And did we create another serial killer in the process? Yun-o coached Sum to kill the cat (that he ran over, mind you) to put it out of its misery. Yun-o set in motion the conditions (and the murder weapon in the safety razor blade) for her to kill an attacker. Yun-o came between her and the only two human friends she has, isolating her and threatening her business, forcing her to stop him outside the law.

I recommend this show only to little freaks who can stomach cruelty toward animals, grim prophecies around AI, serial killers who use tech to optimize their sick urges, autistic people finding toxic love, and people in electric wheelchairs who never get anywhere.