The Frog review: Pitch-black South Korean show is a messy pastiche of serial killer thrillers

What is it about South Korea, playground games and mass murder? “We’re playing a big game of tag,” decrees a jaded police officer, in new Netflix drama The Frog. “And some of us are always it.” In this new thriller, the pursuers and pursued switch places, over the course of two decades, again and again, until those peeping out of classroom windows can no longer discern who’s chasing who.

Solitary widower Jeon Young-ha (Kim Yoon-seok) lives alone in the woods where he manages a luxury holiday rental. His quiet life is interrupted by the arrival of unscheduled guests – a beautiful young woman (Go Min-si) and what appears to be her young son. But when the woman and boy disappear, leaving only a trail of suspicious evidence (blood stains, bleach in the bathroom, CCTV footage of her lugging a large bag, etc), doubts begin to creep in. Who was she? And who was the boy? Meanwhile, 20 years earlier, motel owner Gu Sang-jun (Yoon Kye-sang) finds himself caught up with a serial killer who threatens to derail his business, marriage and entire life. What links these two cases? It’s down to a hotshot detective (“banished to this backwater”), Yoon Bo-min (Lee Jung-eun), to unravel that.

South Korea has long been the West’s preferred Korea – but, in recent years, it has also become the dominant exporter of entertainment from east Asia. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (which also stars Lee) became, in 2019, the first non-English language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. A couple of years later, Squid Game, from Hwang Dong-hyuk, became Netflix’s most-watched series. And so, The Frog arrives with more intrigue than your average foreign-language addition to the streaming catalogue. It shares similarities with Parasite – people inveigling their way into other families – not to mention the pitch-black violent streak that typified the brutal social satire of Squid Game.

That’s where the similarities end. The Frog is a messy pastiche of serial killer thrillers, drawing more heavily from American cinema, particularly the canon of David Fincher, than its contemporaries from the Korean peninsula. The enigmatic female lead is pure Gone Girl; the sullen, bookish detective straight out of Se7en. But these influences would be no bad thing (and the repeated, warbling strains of Bobby Bland’s “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City”, a stylish addition) if the plot felt coherent. Instead, it is wilfully withholding, offering only sketchy information and dealing in intentional misdirection. “Perhaps what I’m imagining is utterly ridiculous,” muses Jeon, as the full extent of the madness becomes apparent – it’s a rumination that, sadly, invites baffled assent. Yes, Jeon, it is.

This isn’t to say that The Frog is a tough watch. Its eight episodes slip down like a cup of soju. Netflix and Korean cinema make for happy bedfellows: both seem to exist in an aesthetic landscape where German expressionism never happened. Those who are tired of murky palates, shadowy action and mumbling dialogue will be relieved by a series that is well-lit, adequately saturated and sound recorded with the clarity of an audiobook. The acting, however, is a mixed bag. In the notional lead role, Kim is convincingly knackered as a depressive landlord, but Go struggles to bring sufficient malevolent energy to the character that the show’s entire appeal hangs on. In the pantheon of great female villains – Misery’s Annie Wilkes, Gone Girl’s Amy Elliott Dunne, Killing Eve’s Villanelle – The Frog’s contribution feels tame and derivative.

Cold case completists will find room for The Frog. It has enough twists in its mixed timeline narrative to keep idle viewers engaged. But fans of both Squid Game and Mindhunter will be disappointed by a show that lacks either the clear vision of the former or the sophistication of the latter. Despite a reliable cuckoo-in-the-nest premise, The Frog fails to leap off the screen, arriving with little more than a croak.