Summary
Sweet Home wastes no time getting to the carnage in its bloody opening episode, even if it’s a bit too frantic for its own good.
This recap of Sweet Home season 1, episode 1 contains spoilers. You can check out our spoiler-free season review by clicking these words.
Sweet Home episode 1 begins with a flash-forward to a snowy September, where part-frozen monsters wriggle through the ice and heavily-armed soldiers and their armoured vehicles line a highway. Things aren’t looking good, to say the least, and as an obviously badly-injured man in tattered clothes staggers towards the soldiers, even an innumerable number of gunshots thudding into his body can’t stop him from narrating.
Cutting back to August that same year, we meet Cha Hyun-su, a lonely and suicidal young man moving into the dilapidated Green Home apartment building, where the first thing he does is stand on the balcony and contemplate throwing himself to his death. He’s interrupted, though, by a neighbour, a ballerina, who advises him not to die there since it’ll only cause trouble for the residents. He should find somewhere else to off himself.
Thus begins a spate of introductory weirdness designed to characterize the Green Home as basically a filing cabinet for eccentrics. Whatever kind of plague will come to define the show seems to arrive in a box of rotten fish which make the building manager’s nose violently bleed and cause him to behave in an odd way, though it’s hard to tell whether he was like that before. One of the residents pushes around an empty pram after losing her baby a year prior, which is explained to pretty musician Yoon Ji-su by a serious-looking resident named Jung Jae-heon. Elsewhere, Pyeon Sang-wook, a decidedly unpleasant man with a scarred face and a duct-taped hostage whose screaming mouth he uses as an ashtray, completes the image of a place chock-full of people among whom CGI monsters will probably fit right in.
Hyun-su is invited to be a tester for an upcoming video game, which only makes sense since a lot of this show’s visual design and structure take cues from gaming, but the convention might coincide with his scheduled suicide date. Sweet Home episode 1 isn’t making light of serious depression, but it is using it as the subject of dark humor, slightly reminiscent of Netflix’s After Life, of all things. Hyun-su has been living off noodles, but he finds his delivery strewn all over the corridor outside, leading directly to his starving neighbor’s blood-soaked room. She promptly arrives at his peephole after he has locked himself inside his apartment, but luckily Hyun-su isn’t stupid enough to open the door while her nosebleed and erratic behavior worsen right before his eyes. Before long she’s braying on Ji-su’s door too.
Downstairs, from the perspective of Eun-heok, we see the building’s residents frantically milling around, realizing they’ve been locked inside by someone. With the help of firefighter Seo Yi-kyung, Eun-heok breaks into the management office, but when they try and call for help every operator is busy with disaster reports. Whatever weirdness is going on isn’t just contained to the Green Home but the world outside, too, as evidenced by the fact that a long-fingered monster man is stood outside with a whip-like tongue he can use to impale people, as we learn when the gang gets the shutters open and inadvertently let him run amok. Eun-heok is able to fight him off with a fire extinguisher while Yi-kyung tackles him back outside, and they’re able to lock him out again. But as they stand and survey the outdoors, they see that there are many more creatures outside, all different, all monstrous, and all hungry for protein.
Upstairs, while Hyun-su surveys the burning city from his apartment window, his nose starts bleeding.
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