Death's Game

Story: Choi Yi-jae (Seo In-guk) is about to get his university degree and he already has a promising job interview at a large company. On the way there, however, he witnesses someone jumping in front of a car to take his own life. The man dies right in front of Yi-jae, and so the young man is so emotionally agitated that he completely fails at his job interview. For seven years, he then applies everywhere without ever hearing back. He does all kinds of temporary jobs, but at some point, he has to realize that all this doesn't make sense anymore. He doesn't want to be a burden to his long-time girlfriend Ji-so (Go Youn-jung) anymore and so he ends the relationship. He then goes on a rooftop and leaps to his death. Nevertheless, he can't find peace, because he wakes up in a world in between, where he is welcomed by death (Park So-dam). Death makes it clear to him that she is quite angry, because she feels like Yi-jae mocked her and also caused suffering to a lot of people around him. She therefore wants to play a game with the man who chose suicide. He has twelve chances to slip into a person's life and save them from their predestined deaths. If he succeeds in doing so just once, he does not have to spend eternity in damnation. Yi-jae swears he will win death's game, but that doesn't turn out to be that easy...

Review: The extremely good ratings on Amazon, where the series can be streamed, as well as the plot made me quite curious. And after a short time, excitement even started to spread. Because "Death's Game" really offers everything: action, fantasy, suspense, horror, drama and even romance. The budget is remarkable too. Each episode on its own could be a tiny movie. And the further you get in the eight-episode-long series, the more impressive the whole thing seems to get. You feel like there is actually nothing to complain about. However, a few problems gradually emerge that should not be swept under the carpet. For example, "Death's Game" tries to be too much. You inevitably have to ask yourself whether the same audience that watches scenes that could have sprung right out of a (well-made) romantic drama can also stomach the moments in which a victim's limbs are severed with a chainsaw (still rated R, though). "Death's Game" wants too much and tries to satisfy everyone. This works better than it would have in a movie, because individual episodes are allowed to focus more on a certain genre, and no one would criticize a series for being episodic. It also has to be mentioned that this is complaining at a high level. Because no matter which genre the series currently delves into, quality-wise it is always appealing.

The whole story - a supernatural hook, rules of a "game" that need to be followed, and questions about your own moral compass - already suggests that "Death's Game" is based on a webtoon. Lee Won-sik and Ggulchan are responsible for the original material, and as far as I could tell, the series generally stays true to it. The focus is on the hero's suicide and whether it was "justified" or "stupid" and selfish. Death has a very clear opinion about that, but she can also compare things with every living or already dead person in the world. Therefore, she knows about the enormous suffering that some people have to endure but still keep going. And so, Yi-jae is obviously supposed to grow as a person and question his decision from back then. Now, there are also critics who have a big problem with the message of the series and rightly point out that the series was also government-funded (in terms of suicide rate Korea is always in the top 5 of all countries world-wide), and that there is probably a little propaganda at work here. But I don't see anything reprehensible about showing that you can shift your perspective once in a while too, and that you should also see the beautiful things in life - even though that may seem a bit like fortune cookie philosophy. One problem, however, is that the makers of the drama show didn't consider the fact that each person has a different vessel which can bear different volumes of suffering. If the vessel is full, you simply can't take it anymore, no matter how big the vessel is. And for Yi-jae, that moment had come.

In the first episodes, there is always a scene in which we see more and more of a location where two people are believed to have died. At this point, my thoughts went into a completely different direction than the story intended to, and that might have been a bit disappointing, as it would have made another level of making amends necessary, but the scene also already hints at the fact that the chronology of the lives of the people Yi-jae slips into is not as linear as you might assume at first. Of course, Seo In-guk ("Pipeline") deserves a lot of praise as the hero of the story, but the whole series is chock-full of great acting performances. Especially, Lee Jae-wook (from the drama series "Alchemy of Souls") and Choi Si-won ("Battle of Wits") as the villain manage to stand out. It's really satisfying to see how Yi-jae always shines through in other characters too. Even though they retain their own personality every time, as it was shaped by their memories (which Yi-jae receives after a short time), we are still able to recognize the protagonist in them. We are always able to feel Yi-jae's pain and see his naivety and frustration that make him so human. It also gets clear that the different personalities are all tilting at their own windmills. There is the student who is bullied, or the policeman who is confronted with an overly powerful opponent who has a hold on the media and turns lies into truths. Especially in the latter case, you wonder why the policeman goes to the media in the first place and doesn't just post the video evidence directly on X/Twitter or another social network letting things take their course, so that traditional newspapers are forced to report about it as well. But it's never really clear in which year exactly the series is set. After all, it was not all that long ago that social networks were also put under pressure (see Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's confession/complaint) and so perhaps you shouldn't be quite so strict about the plot holes here.

But "Death's Game" is not a political thriller - or not exclusively so. We also get a classic gangster story with a really impressive chase scene and some action, and a horror thriller about a serial killer whose actions are quite shocking too. The pacing is almost always enormously high, and thankfully the individual episodes don't just focus on one person alone. So, there are constant changes, and an episode is not just designed for action or drama. And we get smooth transitions too. Of course, it also turns out that the different lives are interconnected. But Yi-jae directly contributes to this too. Since he keeps the old memories in his next body, he can finally get the money the gangster has hidden, for example, or gather evidence for a murder. At the end, the individual storylines create a complex structure, which makes it easy for you to overlook the fact that sometimes everything fits together a bit too easily. The romance between Yi-jae and his girlfriend also gets a continuation, and it is able to keep up with the best representatives of the genre (even though I don't have too much material to compare it to), and just when you think that things might get a bit too cheesy, the series leaps forward and there is a new twist. As mentioned before, this might occasionally seem a bit constructed, but it holds all episodes together surprisingly well.

Park So-dam ("Special Delivery") as Death offers the necessary coolness factor always making it clear that she is morally superior, or at least believes to be, and, as an eternally old being, also has the right to do so. Towards the end, the drama inevitably has to come more to the fore. In the last episodes you might find yourself wishing for one or two action scenes, especially since director Ha Byeong-hoon has proven to have a knack for it, but you also have to admit that it wouldn't have fit in at all. The ending is also somewhat predictable. But all this cannot deny the fact that we get great directing and an ambitious sweeping swipe at various genres as almost all of them are presented at a high level. This may sometimes give the impression that "Death's Game" is a bit overambitious, but the series is also simply immensely entertaining. At least I hadn't really heard much about the series before, and so we can only hope that it gets the success it deserves, because rarely do we get a series (no matter from which country) that is so gripping and captivating like this one is, despite some of its tiny flaws. And the great performances are just the icing on the cake.

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