Somebody Review: Netflix Korean Series Disturbing and Disturbing Eroticism Between Asperger’s and Social Danger
Cast: Kim Young-Kwang, Kang Hae-Lim, Kim Yong-Ji, Kim Soo-Yeon, Kim Soo-Yeon and Choi Yu-Ha
Creator: Jung Ji-Woo
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Somebody, as we will see shortly, is a highly distinctive work, close to a certain Korean cinema and it is no coincidence that the director is Jung Ji-Woo, one of the fathers of new Korean cinema; a director is internationally known for having directed the erotic thriller Happy End, a film repeatedly recalled in the series in question. So, let’s go explore it together in our Somebody review. A few days ago, the Netflix schedule has been enriched with a new Korean series: Somebody, a mini-series of 8 episodes of about 50 minutes each; a typical format of Netflix and lately embraced by several Korean series that are slowly reducing their river format, of about 16 episodes with an average duration of 70/80 minutes, to embrace shorter periods (think of Squid Game or The Silent Sea, two well-known Korean Netflix-branded series).
From the triumph at the 2019 Oscars with Parasite to the record number of views of the event series Squid Game, Korean cinema is experiencing a moment of a strong revival. Through its unmistakable style, refined and at the same time gruesome, it is above all the thriller that expresses the uniqueness and potential of a particular artistic vision, recognizable from the European one, as distant from the more codified and usual North American one. Riding the wave of the k-drama phenomenon, from 18 November 2022 Netflix makes Somebody available, an intriguing thriller with erotic and sometimes horrific veins that are worth a look.
Somebody Review: The Story
The young and brilliant Kim Sum (Kang Hae-Lim) has developed a particular social networking application intended to bring future couples together: Somebody. Kim Sum pours all her energies into work, also due to difficult social integration; she is a girl with Asperger’s syndrome, often discriminated against for her condition. One day, using the app of her invention, she meets an enigmatic and mysterious boy: the architectural designer Seong Yun-o (Kim Young-Kwang). We immediately discover one of the dark sides of the young man, who uses the app to commit brutal murders. In the meantime, the man will meet other women including the policewoman Yeong Gi-Eun, confined to a wheelchair due to an accident, and the shaman Im Mok-won. The three young women know each other quite well and all three will interface in different ways with the lethal killer. The hunt begins.
Directed in all eight episodes by Jung Ji-Woo, here in his first direction in a serial story, the trick of the thrilling finds its beginning with the idea and the development of an artificial intelligence system created by Kim Sum (Kang Hae-Lim), a young programmer with Asperger’s syndrome who, during a technology fair, presents Somebody, an instant messaging prototype capable of detecting the content of written and then deleted sentences in a conversation; that is, able to keep in the chat memory the thoughtful, typed but never sent answer (therefore the idea) of the profile considered “shy”. The idea was immediately detected and exploited for the development of an immediately successful meeting app, and Kim Sum, from an anonymous nerd, became the director of the company in a few years.
Despite having managed to make millions of people around the world fall in love with her, Sum’s life is almost solitary, consumed between work and an anonymous house surrounded by technology, until, thanks to a lucky match, she meets the architectural designer Seong Yun- Or (Kim Young-Kwang), a young man who finally gets in touch with his outlandish nature. What the protagonist does not know, but which she will soon inevitably find out thanks to the only relationships she has managed to establish, the two friends Yeong Gi-Eun (Kim Soo-Yeon), a police officer confined to a wheelchair, and Mok-Won (Kim Yong-Ji), a nun with shamanic powers ‒ is that the ‘oddball’ boy who satisfies her sexually and indulges her intellectually is a serial killer who works undisturbed for the network by constantly changing his identity, the very result of his invention for lonely hearts and which he will not be able to do without for a long time.
Somebody Review and Analysis
Somebody is a highly layered series which, however, from the very first minutes is imbued with noir and thriller shades, genres that are very well known and loved in Korea. It is no coincidence that the first images are set in a narrow alley on the outskirts of Seoul; an alley wrapped in the darkness of darkness and incessant rain. A few seconds and we are catapulted into a small, dilapidated shopping centre, in whose basement there is a real clandestine gambling den. A beginning that we could define as stimulating. In any case, although the series has a deliberately slow and authorial pace, ready to dig both into the psyche of the subjects and to reflect on contemporary problems, it tends to give its best in the bloodiest and most disturbing moments. The first episode in this regard ends with a high rate of unease when the crystalline talent of director Jung Ji-Woo emerges, the master of new Korean cinema.
Sudden cut and here we are suddenly catapulted into a gloomy bathroom, where the killer Seong Yun-o is intent on raping a young woman: both are inside a bathtub full of water and parallel to the rape, the young woman is drowned. The director first proposes a lead shot capable of crushing the girl as much as possible, as well as emphasizing the physical majesty of the killer (a new Apollo). Then the camera will offer a close-up – in contre-plongée – of the protagonist, whose face is immersed in water and rejoices for the murder in progress.
Or the assault – again by the killer – suffered by a well-known architecture professor is memorable. The unsuspecting man is deceived into an abandoned silus; at first, his face is repeatedly crushed into the wall of the sinus, before being dragged down the stairs. The camera now gradually moves backwards emphasizing the dramatic tension, and action combined with a slight acceleration of the frames (fast-motion) that almost seems to give the killer demonic abilities. In the course of the series we will then find murders in ellipsis, off-screen, or taken up in the smallest details with a direction that is always attentive to macabre detail, but at the same time inclined to carry out symbolic-narrative reflections or anticipations. Murders worthy of the best Kim Jee-woon or Park Chan-wook.
Another distinctive aspect of the series concerns the representation of Asperger’s syndrome, taken at various stages of human development, all through the story of the protagonist Kim Sum. Through flashbacks of her, we see her, together with her mother, intent on learning the most basic emotions unknown to her; her child shows an above average intelligence, however, she is unable, at least initially, to understand what happiness, sadness or fear are. As she grows up, the girl will have to contend with the nasty social plagues of xenophobia and her ability, but she will always manage exceedingly well. The series deals with the issue of the right realism, avoiding triviality or fake respectability.
Another topos of the work concerns the analysis of the dangers of some messaging and dating applications. Applications often leave you at the mercy of chaos, where anyone can pretend to be another person. Applications that are difficult to monitor and can lead to extreme and lethal consequences. Not surprisingly, in the series the serial killer meets his victims with disarming ease using the Somebody application; or, again via the app, a brutal and vile rape party is organized. In any case, the series tends to address other important social issues: we talk about disability, the ineptitude of the police forces, wicked retraining and how shamanism is implemented in Korean society, which does not always lead to idyllic solutions: the ‘former South Korean president Park Geun-Hye has ruined her life, and her career, because of her frequent visits with the shaman and friend Choi Son-sil.
A further important aspect of the series concerns a certain eroticism beautifully staged, where carnal or metaphorical sequences marry perfectly. In South Korea, sex scenes are a bit of a taboo, but not for director Jung Ji-Woo who already in 1999, with the sublime Happy End, surprised audiences and critics amid murders and sequences under the sheets. In the first episode, for example, we witness a sensational scene full of sexual allusions. The alleged Killer is teaching the protagonist how to play the piano. The man performs slow and strange undulating movements of the body that seem to recall a sexual act in no uncertain terms.
In the third episode instead, we witness a highly erotic sequence worthy of the best Tinto Brass. There is no shortage of succulent foreplay, up to the climax of the action; action filmed in a very atypical way by exploiting a supine shot, whose visual axis takes up a mirror; a mirror that duplicates the image alluding to the double life of Seong Yun-o: Latin lover architect by day, lethal serial killer by night. Or think of the approach in a lounge bar between the shaman and a wealth manager. Sensual sequence, between close-up details or a camera positioned beyond the rooms and windows, as if to allude to the impossibility of their relationship. Eroticism is staged in the most disparate ways possible, always under the banner of an excellent and refined direction.
We conclude this review by talking about the atypical narrative structure. Essentially we have four protagonists who often tend to interface with each other, creating dense networks of connection. Protagonists appear and disappear from the screen. Not infrequently, the director decides to suddenly truncate a salient situation, thus shifting the attention to other shores, to then resume everything in the following episode via flashback. Intricate solutions that always find a logical reason, and a concrete link placed in each sequence: a joke, a phone ringing, a particular image is enough and the narrative mosaic takes shape. Pure genius.
Somebody Review: The Last Words
Somebody is as much an authorial as a genre series. A product capable of delving into the intricacies of the human psyche as well as proposing interesting social reflections. A series at times disturbing but incredibly realistic in its macabre staging. In the aseptic and a-corporeal world in which the characters move, monitored by algorithms but very much in need of physical contact, Somebody takes the asociality of the new millennium to extremes by building a network of femicides and momentary passions, blurring the thriller conventions towards horror and detective drifts, thus ranging between genres with a certain, appreciable, artistic freedom of its creators. On the other hand, the fascination of the story does not lie in following the slow discovery of the already announced identity of a serial murderer, but rather in moving in the balance between the attraction/repulsion of the two protagonists, in a decadent Soul that demolishes its buildings and traps its inhabitants.
