Recipe:
Mix 1 Part Hyun Joo with 1 Part Kyung Soo.
Add your 3 Parks: 1/2 doses of Soon&Eun+a dash of Hoon.
Essential bitters: Jung Ki&Mi Kyung form the base layer; a light spritz of Mok&Sik are front of mouth flavors…
Enjoy with snacks and sip responsibly for just over 4 hours of mysterious murky magnificence!

This started as a feed post, not a review, so pardon it lacking the usual structure reviews get! Title and above nonsense (the cast names of important people in the storyline and wordplay of their roles and or time on screen) are just me being silly while a bit hungry, not having a review summary, and noticing the cast member names and just going with it for no reason but semi-delirium (note: I know very little about alcoholic beverages or their mock versions as I don’t drink em). :)

This show probably won’t suit the tastes of even a third of people who like dark (in this case murder) mysteries. This would have been called suspense before the genre vs tag MDL change-there is a bit of thrill at the end, but this is more “just what is going on here?” mystery than thrill-provoking or scary even though there are a few murders (the murders are the catalyst, not the focus). With a runtime of 4 hours and 20 minutes (once you take out the very long Netflix credits), this feels like a small-scale but well fleshed out film more than a drama/miniseries.

The acting is incredibly realistic and believable throughout. It left me very curious what the leads were thinking/what their motivations truly were. I even felt myself, 2/3 or so through it, questioning whether I’d just glimpsed a few flashes of intense greed from the female lead who is otherwise a lovely, intelligent, hardworking protagonist who has faced a lot of bad luck and scorn, largely from the universal tool people love judging others on: wealth/social status. Quite the hellish chain of events turn her life upside down: struggling to advance in her career (that wealth detail), a husband who we learn right away is rotten but WOW we REALLLLLY learn how rotten in a short bit of time… and the central catalyst for her work flipping, a paternal uncle she didn’t know existed (because her father left when she was a kid) dies and an abnormally valuable piece of land, a burial ground, is left to her by default as the only known remaining family…

She has to suddenly face some long-repressed or ignored memories from when she was 5-7 or so as well as a brief one from a moment in early adolescence when her mother has brought home a slimy feeling guy (amazing how some moments and the performances of them are strong enough with just a few words, in this case “You’re pretty just like your mother,” to really make your skin crawl!) and she went to peek into her father’s life where she sees a child who proves to be her half-brother. Back to the present, that half-brother is now a young man who shows up and announces who he is, demanding that he has just as much right to the burial ground as her.

For many people, I need not mention the beauty or skill of Kim Hyun Joo. She can make me cry, rage out, or shudder in half a second depending on her script (I liken her to Kim Seo Kyung in that sense… both are undervalued globally but can carry tender or tough, warm or cold, and complex roles with ease, showing enough nuance and charm the whole while)-not that all her scripts are gold, just that she has always been one of the lovely actresses that isn’t reliant on visuals but is actually able to give powerful performances across a wide spectrum (still waiting for her to be a truly f’d up villain, but I don’t know that it’d be offered with her face). That said, I do have a fully admitted weakness for her and have since 1999. She was my goddess then, and she is my goddess now. Other goddess-level actresses like Im Ye Jin and our original wave maker (more a QUEEN than goddess but her porcelain doll visuals helped, I am sure) Lee Young Ae preceded her in my viewing timeline, but Kim Hyun Joo truly made my face transform into one of a smitten, fluttering cat wanting to perch by her feet-which proved good judgment on my part from all I’ve seen said of her these 2.5 decades of viewing her adoringly!

Two of the three lead male costars have been in other works with her. Returning from the male lead role in Jung_E and a support role in Hellbound is Ryu Kyung Soo, certainly the most striking and unique character here (and who I would call the lead from both screen time/prominence and “irreplaceability” ie how central the role is to telling the story). He plays the half-brother to her in what is the most memorable role I personally have watched him in thus far. His character is one they refuse to give you any quick answers about in terms of telling you the motivations behind or the character of (or reasons for it)… they roll it out to the detectives and female lead slowly, methodically, and with his words and actions being unclear, and in turn we are left curious and possibly guessing. His execution was fantastic (to a point of wanting to pause on many frames and study his face and figure him out or just appreciate the craft he was showcasing though I let it play out at the speed designated, possibly because there was no 6 day or even several hour long wait for the next episode)!

The other returning costar is her co-lead from Trolley, the ever-charming/alluring Park Hee Soon with his gravelly voice and weary, melancholy expression. I’ve often found him magnetic as my eyes would declare, and it is not for some sort of “hot guy alert” reason but how he carries himself when embodying his characters and the nuanced, almost micro expressions that make him interesting to see as just about any character. Here he plays a detective who is consistently insightful, quick-witted, and incredibly thorough in investigations (the chief used an interesting expression regarding the reports written up by him, essentially saying they had ‘military level precision’ in terms of diligence and integrity [I can’t recall the subs from Netflix and don’t rely on them fully for accuracy unless the translation center in my brain is too tired/out cold and cannot process the words with any realistic speed]). His character itself is, on the surface, nothing much, but not only is there a backstory I enjoyed the telling of but he is, simply put, an excellent actor for the camera and in turn our eyes to follow as the story unravels. His exceptional intuition and veteran wisdom as a detective make uncovering details through him a delight no matter what he is in, really… well, usually. :)

Our final lead role is also a police officer, Park Byung Eun carrying out the role of a team leader with a complicated relationship with the savvy detective PHS plays. Theirs is a loyal friend&partner [, dongsaeng&hyung, hoobae&sunbae]-turned superior&subordinate antagonistic relationship, one filled with feelings of a conflict, guilt, and inferiority, between them. PBE plays the former hoobae, current superior who feels pitied and inferior in his capacity as an officer, and we see the chief belittle him and their team members show respect but not trust in his insight compared to his former superior turned underling… that makes his judgment even more poor because he feels rushed to solve the case and cannot think straight.

Writing this AFTER finishing the show in one sitting, I am of two minds. First, I think “well done, writer and director” in that they told EXACTLY ENOUGH but no more to fully grasp their present day situation and FEEL it even though it is not our main storyline. That is my dominant mindset and how I felt WATCHING it… but then in retrospect, I can see some, maybe many, feeling less than satisfied by there BEING these backstories for something so short and so plot-centered. I can definitely see a lot of viewers wanting “more action” whereas I really appreciate them giving me a story to sink into for these cops. I guess I have seen just tooooo many police officer props who exist as their title, not their name, their family upbringing, their spouse and kids if they have them, their aspirations, or even their work history beyond “this title means they are [tried tested veterans of the field/rookies who are drowning-level wet behind the ears, probably older/approaching retirement and running everything from behind a desk etc]…” assumed backgrounds.

I am a big fan of tightly controlled backstory narratives that let me feel like I am watching people with real lives and a wide spectrum of feelings, NOT PROPS/plot devices which sadly is what a heck of a lot of characters end up being. (You know how many characters solely exist to propel the story for the lead character(s) at this or that point and feel like they display a lazy writer not knowing how to get from points A to B to C? I call those characters props or plot devices because they aren’t given much to show their humanity besides their bodies… their feelings, quirks, even at times their jobs are really lazily thought through. That “tightly controlled” part is the problem for other sorts of writers who spend so much time writing up characters that they keep diverging from the core storyline and the character(s) that matter the most, whose stories are defining the arc of the narrative to begin with.

For that backstory here, since the creators opted to use a very short amount of time in total to juggle the plot and character exploration and development, they used one of the most easy to screw up tools: flashbacks. I don’t generally love writers using loads of flashbacks, but this kept the flashback scenes tight and purposeful. They weren’t the usual trite, shallow filler (the “empty calories” kinds of details thrown in that add little but bulk), at least in my viewing. They also didn’t try, in this short time, to shove deep philosophical/spiritual reflections at us which seems to be a common pitfall for thrillers that dive into territorylike shamanistic or religious rituals. The flashbacks in The Bequeathed are sensible: they happened long ago, and most revolve around people who are deceased in the story’s time frame. It would take twice the time (and SO MANY *BIG* time skips!) to make this linear and incorporate all the vivid details they use flashbacks to show us, and I don’t want that for this show! Where utilized, I found the flashbacks meaningful (many are going into the mind of the female lead as little fragments of long-repressed/ignored/“forgotten” memories get triggered by bits of the investigation and this new half-brother figure); they were consistently adding to the story positively, not distracting-thereby-detracting from it as happens more often than not, and as a perk, they were well-styled! No need to tell me about when they were flashing back to or for me to see kids at this or that age in the flashbacks-they gave the father a completely iconic couple of looks that briefly let me time travel to the times and places of the FL’s memories that were essential to the story!

The final 60-90 minutes of this were *truly* well-played! Color me impressed, but a writer managed to actually find a pretty dang original combination of details to ACTUALLY twist this thing like a pretzel JUST ENOUGH to make it memorable and different, not just a recycled plot from a thousand other stories. What overlaps is only natural… they ARE the same species, after all (both the writers-so far, though other critters might catch up one day!-and the characters written about)! What is different is still wholly human but for some reason just hasn’t crossed my eyes in this combo.

I need to give MASSIVE applause to whoever either found or designed and carried out the scene with the BEAUTIFUL kiln (/set) that briefly makes a spectacular appearance in this? I am leaving this review totally vague to avoid spoilers, but man, that scene won’t leave my head for a long while. It isn’t like kilns themselves are new to me. I have been in huge ones and used regular sized ones alike and, as dramas go, watched one being made in the awful melodrama When I Was the Prettiest from a few years ago (pottery is the starting point of its story, its primary location the kiln and studio etc, and it is at least half of why I watched). This simple, single, urn-making kiln, though, was both a massive surprise in this story but also just a magnificent place for the scene they wrote there. It is a case where a kind of “out there” unrealistic, different idea might totally flop for many but became my favorite scene in the whole show, the camera angles of it, all the actual clay(mud=clay) holding bricks together as they seal it to fire urns, seeing the inside of it (even though I assume movie magic was required, it sure felt like I was in there looking at the shelves of urns and all the sturdy brick walls around! Unless they used some GoPro sort of tiny camera in one and used very long robot arm style rods to have it shooting in all directions, I can’t imagine getting shots like that in a kiln the size of what we saw on screen, but bravo three times over if they did!!)… I dunno why, but it is stuck in my head!

This is random, but if only to remember myself later on, I want to document another peculiar near-uniqueness of this show:
It is not every day you see a display of self defense by nose biting! ;)