Summary
Gyeongseong Creature is undeniably overlong, but that aside, it’s a very high-quality production with enough action, horror, mystery, and romance to satisfy.
These days, you can take the way Netflix releases its big originals as a measure of its confidence in the property. Most stuff gets released all at once, business as usual. But the heavy hitters, like The Witcher and Stranger Things and, erm, Virgin River, all released in two parts. The same can be said of the new historical K-Drama Gyeongseong Creature, a fusion of horror, action, and romance set against the backdrop of Japan’s occupation of Korea.
Part 1 of the series, released on December 22, 2023, consists of seven episodes, each running comfortably over an hour (yes, we’ll talk about this in a minute.) Part 2 will debut on January 5 with the final three episodes ringing in the new year and presumably getting the streaming giant’s K-Drama lineup off to a good start.
Gyeongseong Creature Season 1 Part 1 review and plot summary
Set in 1945, which was historically not a great year for Japan, Gyeongseong – now Seoul – is still tentatively under Japanese rule. But a change is coming, and everyone can feel it, from the everyday folks trying to get by under occupation to the rebel groups hoping to oust the occupiers. Japanese geopolitical defeat will finally mean freedom for Korea.
Some have done okay in the present circumstances, though, and one of them is Jang Tae-sang (Park Seo-joon), a pawnbroker and information dealer who has amassed a sizeable amount of wealth and influence. A dalliance with a Japanese soldier’s wife, though, threatens his fortune and his life, so he’s forced into a finding missing girl.
For this, Tae-sang teams up with Yoon Chae-ok (Han So-hee), a sleuth who works in a father-daughter team with her dad Joong-won (Jo Han-chul) and is an expert in finding people – though not, crucially, in finding her mother, for whom she has spent the last decade unsuccessfully searching.
The unlikely team-up quickly develops romantic connotations as Tae-sang and Chae-ok are led to the spooky Onseong Hospital, where macabre experiments are being conducted on the many women who seem to be disappearing from all over Korea.
There’s nothing new here, but the combination of familiar elements in this specific composition is enough to provide plenty of consistent drama, especially given the sheer quality of the production. I have no idea how much this cost to make, but I strongly suspect it was a considerable amount since the period detail, production, costume design, and even effects are striking; it’s a far cry from the somewhat slap-dash feel of Sweet Home Season 2, another monster-themed K-Drama released by Netflix in December that looked on more than a few occasions like a PS2-era video game.
RELATED: When will Gyeongseong Creature Season 1 Part 2 be out?
Perhaps it’s because we don’t actually see much of the titular creature, which is a selling point for a while but does become one of the show’s more pernicious problems down the line. A few horror-standard jump scares and an errant tentacle here and there create enough mystique around the monster that we’re curious to see more of it, but we’re expected to wait a mighty long time to do so – and on that subject, we’re expected to wait rather a long time for everything else, too.
Netflix’s whole two-part deal seems like a way to build hype for major shows, and it probably is in most cases, but with Gyeongseong Creature it also seems like a contingency measure to ensure that a ludicrously long show can be consumed in full without the viewership dropping off out of sheer exhaustion. There’s little need for every episode to be 80 minutes long, and yet they are, and sometimes they really feel it.
Also like Sweet Home, the monstrous aspect of Gyeongseong Creature is really about something else – in this case the Japanese occupation of Korea. But unlike Sweet Home it doesn’t go overboard with it, instead remaining focused on the plot and the central romance rather than the thematic underpinnings. This is good since it’s one thing to get the point and quite another to have it constantly reiterated to you regardless. This show trusts its audience a little more and builds real human stakes around the characters we’re spending the most time with.
And the connections between those characters feel organic and earned. Yes, the romance is inevitable, but that’s always the case; what matters is that Tae-sang and Chae-ok both learn more about themselves through the other, their responsibilities and purpose challenged by the circumstances they both find themselves in, rather than having to navigate contrived scenarios that exist only to make some kind of obvious wider point.
Put some time aside
Length notwithstanding, Gyeongseong Creature is very good. The performances are strong, the action is fun, the horror works, the story grips, and the historical context adds an oppressive subtext without overwhelming the monster storyline entirely.
It could stand to commit more, and earlier, and perhaps not belabor every point to the extent it does, but there’s a possibility I’m just oversensitive to this kind of thing given I have to spend every day of my life covering it. For the ardent K-Drama fanbase who can’t skip a period piece or a romance, Gyeongseong Creature will provide that and more. Just make sure you don’t have any plans for the weekend.
What did you think of Gyeongseong Creature Season 1 Part 1? Comment below.
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