Summary
The creator of Train to Busan goes straight to Hell in this intriguing supernatural series.
If there’s a constant in Yeon Sang-ho’s career, then it’s change. After beginning his career with the animated King of Pigs, he has since crossed over into the global mainstream with Train to Busan. Since then, he’s kept adapting with Psychokinesis and Busan sequel Peninsula. With HELLBOUND (지옥), Yeon’s second foray into television, he brings the blockbuster sensibilities of his features to serial storytelling.
Co-created by Yeon and Choi Gyu-seok (Awl), adapting Yeon’s own webtoon, it begins as three hulking demonic figures appear out of the ether, beat down a fellow fleeing from a café, and leave nothing but a pile of ashes. It soon emerges that people are hearing predictions of when they will die, and these monsters are sending those people straight to hell.
Jung Jin-Soo (Yoo Ah-In) of the religious cult New Truth, explains the phenomena as a revelation from god, gaining enthusiastic and dedicated followers across Korea. Jin Kyung-Hoon (Yang Ik-June) is a detective investigating the deaths while dealing with the darkness in his own past. Intersecting with these strange events is lawyer Min Hey-Jin (Kim Hyun-Joo), who stands up to the Arrowhead group who follows Jung Jin-Soo’s teachings.
Following the based-on-a-spiritually-themed-webtoon sub-genre that made Along With the Gods such as success, HELLBOUND wastes no time in wowing us with the scale of its ambition. From giant heads appearing to tell people they will die through to the aforementioned demons, there’s clearly some of that good Netflix money involved here. Of course, if it was just a special effects outing it wouldn’t be a Yeon Sang-ho joint.
Genuinely creepy in parts, especially as revelations about the various characters come to light, much of the first half of the series is investigative in nature. There’s the more obvious plots from the cops and journalists, but as aspects of Jung Jin-Soo’s character unfurl, one suspects that this will end with some major reveals. Where it gets especially interesting is where the intersection of ‘cult’ behaviour and media intersect. Jung Jin-Soo’s followers might seem blind, but there’s a spectacularly tense scene in which hundreds of onlookers and the assembled media have gathered ostensibly to watch a woman die.
Yoo Ah-In, known most recently for zombie films like #Alive, is an intriguing lead character — we genuinely don’t know what motivates him for the longest time, and that’s properly scary. Similarly, Yang Ik-June brings a rounded performance to a character that has some layers to unpick.
Festival viewers have been treated to the first three episodes of this six part series, with the remainder coming to Netflix at a future date. So, it’s difficult to give this a complete review at this stage, but the bones are good. There’s several notable cliffhangers that will make this compelling viewing when it hits the streaming giant later this year, and I can’t wait to see how it ends.
HELLBOUND is reviewed as part of our coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2021.
2021 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Yeon Sang-ho | WRITER: Yeon Sang-ho, Choi Kyu-sok | CAST: Yoo Ah-in, Park Jung-min, Kim Hyun-joo, Won Jin-ah | DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix, TIFF 2021 | RELEASE DATE: 9 September – 18 September 2021 (TIFF 2021), TBA (Netflix)
