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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Go Hyun-jung, Jang Dong-yoon
Latest Nielsen rating: 6.9 per cent
Go Hyun-jung (Mask Girl) is back as the titular character of Queen Mantis, a new show about serial killers and dark family secrets.
While this is an official remake of the French series La Mante, viewers are more likely to be reminded of the big-screen classic The Silence of the Lambs, to which both are heavily indebted.


Go plays Jung Yi-shin, a woman who terrorised South Korea 25 years ago after she embarked on a series of vicious and distinctive slayings, targeting male sexual predators.
Yi-shin may be behind bars, but Choi Jung-ho (Cho Seong-ha, Captivating the King), the grizzled detective who caught her all those years ago, is alarmed when a new body turns up bearing her unmistakable modus operandi – a sexual predator whose tongue has been cut out and placed in his rear.
Evidence on the ground is slim, which leads Jung-ho to approach Yi-shin – whom the public believes to be dead – and seek her guidance to apprehend the new killer.
So far, so Hannibal Lecter, but then comes the twist that makes it clear why this was a prime candidate for a Korean remake. Yi-shin agrees to assist the investigation, but on one condition – she will only talk to Detective Cha Su-yeol (Jang Dong-yoon, Daily Dose of Sunshine), her estranged son.

We are introduced to Su-yeol during a different case, when he and other officers barge into a family’s flat to find a dying man and a woman cowering on the floor with her daughter.
Su-yeol quickly divines that the woman is in fact the culprit, and following a dramatic arrest, her young daughter is faced with an uncertain future, mirroring Su-yeol’s own childhood after his mother’s arrest.
The young detective decides to take the girl in himself. In Su-yeol’s case, it was Jung-ho who took pity on him as a child and later mentored him as a detective.
However, Jung-ho appears in front of Su-yeol again with a heavy heart and a difficult request. Su-yeol explodes when asked to meet his mother again, but he relents and an uneasy investigative collaboration begins.

Su-yeol makes a big show of hating his mother and not wanting to meet her again, yet when he turns up outside the safe house where she is imprisoned with Jung-ho, he catches himself buttoning up his jacket just before they open the door.
Yi-shin is not a normal prisoner. Fully aware of the power she held when Jung-ho initially arrested her without any solid evidence, she managed to negotiate major concessions in exchange for her confession.
She receives favoured treatment in prison, sipping on espressos in her well-stocked cell. Now that the police want something else out of her, she has had herself moved to a house with a yard all to herself, with a single guard watching her.
This happens to align Yi-shin with the notorious ex-Korean president Chun Doo-hwan, who, rather than paying for his crimes as a military dictator in the 1980s, was allowed to live within the confines of a hillside mansion until his death in 2021, at the age of 90.

Much like the late president, Yi-shin is a roundly reviled figure, but society’s attempts to forget her are thwarted by a new monster copying her methods.
While Korea has avoided turning back into a dictatorship since Chun’s ousting in 1987, it is not for lack of trying. Two sitting presidents have been impeached and prosecuted in the past decade, one of whom even reinstated martial law last year for the first time since Chun’s administration.
The hint of generational trauma also pops up in some of the dialogue. While investigating a fresh crime scene, Su-yeol is repulsed when Yi-shin expresses her love for the smell of blood.
She then explains that this is because she associates the smell with him – he was born during a caesarean section, a bloody procedure she was awake for after her anaesthetic wore off.

The political parallels stop there, as Queen Mantis is more interested in its heady combination of classic Korean thriller tropes – the show opens with a nighttime crime scene by a river – and full-on soapy melodrama.
Unlike director Byun Young-joo’s last project – the thriller Black Out, one of our favourite K-dramas of last year – the tone here is broader and more aggressive, with the grim thrills and over-the-top histrionics sometimes making for awkward bedfellows.
However, so long as the pace keeps up, this could still make for a fun and punchy series, given its tight eight-episode run.
Queen Mantis is streaming on Netflix.


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Go Hyun-jung plays a serial killer and Jang Dong-yoon her detective son in this Netflix Korean drama about copycat killings


Go Hyun-jung plays a serial killer and Jang Dong-yoon her detective son in this Netflix Korean drama about copycat killings.


Netflix K-drama Queen Mantis: Go Hyun-jung in Silence of the Lambs-like serial killer drama

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Go Hyun-jung plays a serial killer and Jang Dong-yoon her detective son in this Netflix Korean drama about copycat killings

Go Hyun-jung plays a serial killer and Jang Dong-yoon her detective son in this Netflix Korean drama about copycat killings