Summary
Sweet Home Season 3 is a mess once again, capping off an unusually pronounced decline in quality after all the great work the first season did.
The decline of Sweet Home should be studied. It’s easy to forget just how good Season 1 was before a painfully long delay killed interest and a wildly mediocre Season 2 wasn’t worth the wait anyway. Season 3 of Sweet Home, unfortunately, continues the tendency of the second outing to lose itself in reams of cheap-looking CGI and convoluted plotting, making it a disappointing swansong for the series even though it has some dramatic highs.
Following on from the end of Season 2, the third season at least rectifies one of that outing’s most egregious errors by shunting Hyun-su back into a more prominent role. His sidelining saw him return in the finale more monster than man, and that dynamic remains the crux of his arc, which is really the show’s overarching theme in microcosm – can humans and monsters live in harmony, or will one eventually conquer the other?
This idea is complicated a little more here by newer concepts like “neohumans” that blur the lines, but the storytelling still comes second fiddle to protracted CGI sequences that revel in monster designs and action.
Sweet Home Season 3 | Image via Netflix
The action is fine – some of it is even exciting. And the monster designs are often horrific, which is fun on a facile level even if after a while it makes the show feel more like a tour around a menagerie than a coherent drama. But the CGI remains woeful, and it’s so overused that it’s impossible to overlook. The more tasteful, sparing approach in the first season has long since been abandoned, and as a result Season 3, like Season 2 before it, largely looks like a PS2-era cut-scene.
The pace is improved, at least, but slow-burning drama is sacrificed for the sake of maintaining it. By now, the narrative is spread out across multiple factions, with the viewpoint pinballing back and forth to keep audiences abreast of everything. It’s disorienting and lacks rhythm, making it difficult to get swept along as things progress.
I can’t help but feel like the second season backed this one into a corner it couldn’t possibly escape from. The demands of the overly convoluted storylines being carried over are a heavy burden that Sweet Home Season 3 never quite manages to meet. The mess proves too much to navigate, despite some individual moments of excitement and affecting drama.
It’s a shame that what was once a taut and human thriller reinvented itself as a plasticky hodgepodge of ropey visuals and incoherent character drama. The performances are resolute, but they’re straining against both a lacking script and a distractingly cheap backdrop. Sweet Home has its fans, of that there can be no doubt, but it’s hard to imagine even the most die-hard of its supporters not breathing a sigh of relief when the credits roll on the final episode and it all seems to be over.
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