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Pierce Conran

3/5 stars
Lead cast: Jeon So-young, Kang Mi-na, Baek Sun-ho, Hyun Woo-seok, Lee Hyo-je
From shopping and dating to content creation, these days it feels like there is very little that you cannot do with your smartphone. Netflix’s latest original K-drama, If Wishes Could Kill, pushes that reality just a little bit further.
What if there were an app that could grant your deepest desires? In the world of this series, that app exists and it is called Girigo. There is just one catch: once your wish is granted, a 24-hour timer starts ticking, and it is curtains once it hits zero.


When a group of five friends at Seorin High School first learns about the app, they write it off as a bit of hokey mysticism.
Choi Hyeon-wook (Lee Hyo-je, Concrete Utopia) – the joker of the quintet – credits the app when he miraculously ranks first in class on a test. He shows his friends how it works: write your name and birthday on a piece of paper and record yourself with it, earnestly repeating your wish.
During the febrile days of youth, a day can last forever, giving us a little time to get to know this group before the app’s true, horrific nature reveals itself to them.
The anchors of the group are Yoo Se-ah (Jeon So-young, Honour) and Kim Geon-woo (Baek Sun-ho, Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard), who are on the school’s track-and-field team and have lived next door to each other since they were children.

Unbeknown to the rest of the group, they have recently started dating. This will soon become a problem for the haughty Lim Na-ri (former Gugudan member Kang Mi-na), who has a big crush on Geon-woo and does not shy away from showing it.
Holding the key that may help them break the cycle of curses that are about to terrorise them is techie Kang Ha-joon (Hyun Woo-seok, The School Nurse Files).
At first, he uses his programming skills to get rid of the app, but after acknowledging that this is not something that typing commands on a keyboard can stop, he reluctantly contacts his estranged sister and her eccentric husband, powerful shamans living deep in the countryside.
With the seeds of discontent already planted in the group, the supernatural force begins to prod the insecurities of its victims through phantom texts and phone calls that seem to prove how little their friends really think of them.

You would think that knowing the true evil of Girigo would be an effective deterrent to using it, but by stoking misunderstandings, jealousy and pent-up anger, the app finds devious ways to perpetuate itself.
By the time the first countdown runs out, tensions in the group are already at an all-time high, and that is when the show escalates with a gruesome, disturbing set piece that cements their path to perdition.
Following a strong high school-bound start, this slickly produced series expands into shamanistic folk horror, delivering compelling scares in a claustrophobic netherworld that forces those who enter it to confront their fears.
It also takes us through the gruelling backstory of the dreadful events that resulted in the app’s existence.

However, in its desire to fully connect the details and explain its own mythology, If Wishes Could Kill begins to lose steam in its second half. Byzantine explanatory dialogue may test attention spans, but the real problem is that it undercuts the horror.
Fear is what we feel when we face the unknown. By design, all horror stories have to battle diminishing returns with their fright factor as they begin to explain themselves. The key is often choosing the right balance.
This series ultimately gets stuck in its own narrative weeds – head down, digging up every detail when it should be staring out into the abyss, gleaning tension from not knowing when some unseen terror will lash out.
If that seems a little harsh, it is only because it sets the bar pretty high early on.

Today’s youths have never known a world without phones. They are inundated with each other’s images and information, and increasingly have to question whether what they are seeing is even real. Phones and the internet have become our digital extensions, daily tools through which we interact with modern life.
They distort our reality, but without them, are we still able to recognise ourselves? It is a horrifying question, precisely because it has no clear answer.
If Wishes Could Kill is streaming on Netflix.


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Jeon So-young as Yoo Se-ah in a still from If Wishes Could Kill. Photo: Darae Lee/Netflix

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Baek Sun-ho as Kim Geon-woo in a still from If Wishes Could Kill. Photo: Darae Lee/Netflix

Jeon So-young (left) as Yoo Se-ah and Hyun Woo-seok as Kang Ha-joon in a still from If Wishes Could Kill. Photo: Darae Lee/Netflix

Lee Hyo-je (front) as Choi Hyeong-wook and Hyun Woo-seok as Kang Ha-joon in a still from If Wishes Could Kill. Photo: Darae Lee/Netflix

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A sinister phone app grants wishes in the K-drama, blending tech horror with folklore, but it begins to lose steam in the second half


A sinister phone app grants wishes in the K-drama, blending tech horror with folklore, but it begins to lose steam in the second half.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A sinister phone app grants wishes in the K-drama, blending tech horror with folklore, but it begins to lose steam in the second half

A sinister phone app grants wishes in the K-drama, blending tech horror with folklore, but it begins to lose steam in the second half