K-drama Beyond Evil: slow-burning serial killer drama that echoes Korean genre film classics will get under your skin
- The most cinematic K-drama we’ve seen so far this year, Beyond Evil teams up Shin Ha-kyun and Yeo Jin-goo as detectives investigating killings in small town
- The show clearly calls to mind Bong Joon-ho’s crime classic Memories of Murder and leans heavily into other Korean cinematic influences
K-dramas often come armed with big budgets these days but, for the most part, there’s still a fairly clear distinction in production quality between Korean film and TV. Every so often, however, something comes around that blurs those boundaries magnificently.
Shin Ha-kyun plays Lee Dong-sik, a washed-up detective now working as a substation cop in his hometown of Manyang, a small rural community. He mostly completes his work without any hassle, but every so often he gets a mad glint in his eye and goes a little off the rails.
Last seen as a lead in Hotel Del Luna, Yeo Jin-goo plays Han Joo-won, a young hotshot detective who is also the son of a ranking captain that is widely expected to be the next chief of the National Police Agency. He is transferred to the Manyang substation, much to the surprise of his new colleagues, given his credentials. But he has an ulterior motive – he’s working on a covert case with the Foreign Affairs office.
Joo-won is partnered with Dong-sik, and not long after his arrival they search for a local elderly man with dementia wandering around a field. But the man is not all they find; they also come across a corpse protruding through the soil.