K-drama reviews: A Killer Paradox

I decided to start this new series on my blog because 1) I missed writing and 2) I’m obsessed with K-dramas. I’m not entirely sure if this obsession is healthy, but I do think it is linked with my well-being.

Anyways, I just finished another K-drama, as per usual. But, this one in particular I had a thought after watching it: “I need to write about this.”

This K-drama starts off following a young adult, who is still in college but also trying to make ends meet by working at a 24-hour convenience store. One day, these two men show up. One, who is especially drunk, keeps bothering Lee Tang (the young adult). His “friend” acts nicely and tries to mediate the situation. Lee Tang doesn’t think much of this interaction; it’s kind of a typical night shift for him, where he has to interact with annoying customers from time to time.

However, after he clocks out of his shift, he ends up in a situation where he could’ve never imagined himself to be in. He ends up murdering one of the two men because the drunken man’s “friend” was trying to beat Lee Tang [to death] due to him asking the “friend” why he would leave his drunk friend out in the cold. Little does he know, his drunken man was actually killed by his "friend”, which he later finds out.

This ends up into a series of killings done by Lee Tang, but miraculously, he ends up getting away with them due to no evidences being found at the crime scenes. And better yet, he ends up killing people who have done horrible, tragic things (the drunken man’s “friend” was a serial killer on the loose). In a way, this becomes a caveat for his reasoning behind his murders—hence Paradox in the title.

We chase Lee Tang throughout the season, but are also introduced to new characters as the show continues to build out a story, tying in another storyline about a detective who is seeking revenge for his hospitalized father who was a former policeman as well.

I love how this K-drama was filmed. Particularly, in the shots we see continuity in. I don’t mean in the color grading or the storyline, but I mean in the physical objects or parts of the human body that are matched directly after a different shot of something else. For example, what captivated me in the first episode: when Lee Tang is hanging up a poster he had gotten (of the mountains in Canada, which is cold and desolate but his dreams—which I will get into later). He is trying to hammer in a nail with a water bottle and ends up throwing it on the ground—towards the camera—out of frustration and immediately it cuts to an “expired” lunchbox being thrown on the counter of the convenience store he works at. This use of match cutting scenes with an object or a subject different from the previous clip is uncanny because we don’t expect what the next sequence will be.

Now on a side note, we know that Lee Tang’s dream is to travel the world, especially to the rocky mountains in Canada. However, we see towards the end of the movie the goal is to escape to someplace warm. Despite the contrast of the cold and the warm, the similarity they both have is the fact that Lee Tang wants to be alone from not just the fact that he is a killer but also away from the pressure of living in a very fast-paced, capitalistic society. And in a way, we kind of do want to see him alone and find peace.