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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Park Eun-bin, Sul Kyung-gu
Alongside screen veteran Sul Kyung-gu (Kill Boksoon), the breakout star of Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Park Eun-bin, undergoes a massive transformation in the medical drama/ serial killer thriller mash-up Hyper Knife on Disney+.
Sul and Park play surgeons Choi Deok-hee and Jung Se-ok, a former mentor and mentee who experienced a catastrophic falling out. Several years later, desperate events force them back into each other’s lives.
The series opens with parallel sequences of Deok-hee and Se-ok in surgery, but their environments could not be further apart.


Deok-hee is a revered surgeon whose operating theatre features a gallery of venerable onlookers keen for a glimpse of his skills.
Se-ok also has guests viewing her operations, but hers are not spectacled doctors viewing through a window. They are tattooed gangsters watching her through a blurred plastic tarp, part of a makeshift operating theatre hastily set up in an out-of-the-way South Korean Buddhist temple.
Years earlier, while a gifted resident surgeon, Se-ok was banned from performing surgery following an outburst when she was not picked by Deok-hee to go on a special assignment to Boston in the United States.
A year into her ban, she performed an operation anyway and, after a fresh confrontation with Deok-hee, was stripped of her medical licence.
Unable to imagine doing anything else but with no legal recourse to do so, she has turned to performing illegal operations, while also running a pharmacy in a small rural town.

Much of the coverage around Hyper Knife has focused on Park’s transformation into a manic serial killer, a stark change from her bright and innocent turns in Extraordinary Attorney Woo and Castaway Diva.
Hers is a spirited performance but one that lacks an anchor. Park’s eyes throb with unhinged intensity but her character is not always easy to understand.
Flashbacks tell us that Se-ok is brilliant, without showing us how or why. The series wants us to understand that she has empathy, but also to enjoy watching her endeavours as a bloodthirsty murderess.
This turns Hyper Knife into another Dexter-esque tale of a vigilante serial killer who only targets characters so aggressively odious that we are practically begging for Se-ok to dispatch them with her scalpel, whether their crimes warrant it or not.

Sul, appearing in only the second K-drama of his career, following last year’s The Whirlwind, is in more familiar territory.
Throughout his almost 30 years on screen, Sul has specialised in playing morally ambiguous characters, including his amnesiac serial killer in Memoirs of a Murderer and his suicidal salaryman in Lee Chang-dong’s classic film Peppermint Candy.
Park’s manic turn as Se-ok eats up the screen. But look closely and it is actually Sul who is quietly pulling off the more difficult role.
He plays a faded genius from a more patriarchal era, whose decades of success as a surgeon made him feel entitled to subdue his brilliant but unruly student Se-ok with vicious slaps across the face, in full view of colleagues who he knew wouldn’t bat an eye.

In the present, he is faced with the reality that his surgical skills will be taken from him unless he appeals to his former student, who he realises is the only person who can operate on his hands. He tracks her down and appears before her, hat firmly placed within those hands.
Though his appearance may seem meek, shades of his arrogance and anger still flicker behind his eyes, setting up a tense tête-à-tête when the mentor discovers how his mentee has been spending her down time in the years since they last met.
By the end of its second episode, Hyper Knife teases a major power shift in Deok-hee and Se-ok’s relationship, setting the stage for a vicious game of cat-and-mouse between the pair.
While this ongoing confrontation will undoubtedly serve as the main engine of the series, the world that has been built around it so far has not been entirely convincing.

The series shows us a lot without explaining much of what’s going on, and while many characters have been introduced, including fresh-faced medical professionals working beneath each of the leads, their connections to the stories are tenuous, making them hard-to-understand.
This is particularly true of Se-ok’s underling Seo Young-joo (Yoon Chan-young, All of Us Are Dead), who treats his boss’ spontaneous murders the way a pet owner might react to a puppy not yet properly toilet trained.
Se-ok and Deok-hee’s developing relationship will be crucial, but for now Hyper Knife is tiptoeing uncertainly along a knife’s edge.
Hyper Knife is streaming on Disney+.


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Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s Park Eun-bin is barely recognisable as a talented young surgeon who falls out with her mentor (Sul Kyung-gu)


Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s Park Eun-bin is barely recognisable as a talented young surgeon who falls out with her mentor (Sul Kyung-gu).


Disney+ K-drama Hyper Knife: Park Eun-bin, Sul Kyung-gu in medical serial killer thriller

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s Park Eun-bin is barely recognisable as a talented young surgeon who falls out with her mentor (Sul Kyung-gu)

Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s Park Eun-bin is barely recognisable as a talented young surgeon who falls out with her mentor (Sul Kyung-gu)