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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Park Min-young, Wi Ha-joon
Latest Nielsen rating: 4.6 per cent
After appearing just five months ago in the con artist drama Confidence Queen, Park Min-young once again teams up with Prime Video for the soapy thriller Siren’s Kiss, sharing the screen with Wi Ha-joon (Squid Game).
Set against a backdrop of fine art and insurance fraud, this adaptation of the 1999 Japanese series Ice World traces a series of mysterious deaths connected to the formidable auctioneer Han Seol-ah, played with icy aplomb by Park.


Seol-ah leads the auction team at Royal Auction and is the envy of those around her, not least associate auctioneer Kim Yoon-ji (Lee Elijah, The Bait), who has made no secret of vying for her position.
Yoon-ji’s aspirations are cut short when she falls to her death during a Royal Auction event. Did the high-pressure job lead her to take her own life, or was she pushed off the ledge? As the mystery surrounding that question deepens, secrets start to emerge from Seol-ah’s life, cracking her perfect veneer.
The person asking those questions is Cha Woo-seok (Wi), a former detective now working as an insurance investigator. He possesses an uncanny ability to sniff out a lie and follows the scent until he exposes the truth.
Woo-seok had been tipped off by Yoon-ji about a murder committed for an insurance payout, but by the time he arrives to meet her, she has already perished – taking whatever she was going to tell him with her to the grave.

With no evidence of insurance fraud, let alone murder, Woo-seok begins investigating, his sixth sense triggered the moment he meets Seol-ah.
He learns that 10 days earlier, a man in Seol-ah’s orbit died in an accident. The plot thickens when he finds that the deceased had a life insurance policy and Seol-ah was the beneficiary. However, the policy was terminated just before the fatal incident, meaning that Seol-ah did not receive a payout.
Things grow stranger when he discovers the man was Seol-ah’s fiancé. As he digs deeper, he finds more deceased men linked to her, along with more mysteriously cancelled insurance policies.
Woo-seok’s determination stems from personal tragedy. His beloved younger sister lost her life years earlier, and while the case was never solved, Woo-seok believes it was connected to insurance fraud, a conviction that led him into the industry.

Taking a page from the prime-time soap opera playbook, Siren’s Kiss is the kind of show where characters opt for spectacle over talking.
Case in point is our introduction to Seol-ah, who enters a showroom being prepared for a major auction, struts up to the centrepiece artwork and slashes it in front of her shocked colleagues. She has discovered the piece is a fake, but simply explaining that lacks the fevered dramatic pitch the show is angling for.
The inciting death – Yoon-ji plunging onto a glass awning, her lifeless eyes staring at Woo-seok below – strongly echoes the hit prime-time soap The Penthouse, specifically the young girl who falls into the arms of a fountain statue during a party.
Despite the theatrics, heightened emotions and quick-moving plot, Siren’s Kiss is surprisingly slow from scene to scene. Characters stare at each other in lengthy showdowns filled with long pauses and lethargically delivered lines.

Park is in more comfortable territory here than she was in the risible Confidence Queen, which overplayed its hand and left her scrambling. Her performance this time around is crisp and dry, which suits the show’s prime-time soap ambitions.
That said, without the dollop of warmth that she works into her popular romcom roles, Seol-ah can feel a little stiff.
Wi is in similar territory, revisiting a familiar character type in an unusually rigid format. Unfortunately, the charmless Woo-seok offers no new spin on the dogged investigator, reduced to declaiming laboured lines about being able to smell “the stench of someone trading human lives for money”.
Siren’s Kiss knows what kind of show it wants to be but, lacking the knowing humour that buoyed modern classics such as The Penthouse and SKY Castle, it will live or die on the continued strength of its twists and reveals.
Siren’s Kiss is streaming on Prime Video.


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K-drama Siren’s Kiss borrows liberally from the soap opera playbook, but it lacks the humour that lifted similar shows like The Penthouse


K-drama Siren’s Kiss borrows liberally from the soap opera playbook, but it lacks the humour that lifted similar shows like The Penthouse.


Prime Video K-drama Siren’s Kiss: Wi Ha-joon investigates Park Min-young in soapy thriller

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}K-drama Siren’s Kiss borrows liberally from the soap opera playbook, but it lacks the humour that lifted similar shows like The Penthouse

K-drama Siren’s Kiss borrows liberally from the soap opera playbook, but it lacks the humour that lifted similar shows like The Penthouse