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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Jeon So-nee, Koo Kyo-hwan, Lee Jung-hyun, Kwon Hae-hyo
And now for a very different kind of Korean parasite.
After producing the series The Bequeathed earlier this year, Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho is back at the helm for Netflix sci-fi action horror Parasyte: The Grey.
The six-part series is an adaptation of Hitoshi Iwaaki’s classic Japanese manga Parasyte, a huge hit in the 1980s and 90s that has already spawned a popular anime series and a two-part film in Japan.


Although the concept remains the same, Yeon’s drama series diverges from the original manga in many ways. The freakish creature designs and gore are intact, but gone is the high-school setting and much of the comedy. Also absent are the manga’s coming-of-age themes and budding teen romance.
While still entertaining, Parasyte: The Grey is a dry and surprisingly serious affair that gets down to business straight away with an immediate cocktail of dystopia and alien-attack mayhem.
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Just like in the manga, the show begins as tennis-ball-sized green orbs rain down from the sky, out of which crawl insectoid aliens who find the nearest human host, crawl into their orifices and eat their brains.
A few of these balls fall into a stadium where a crowd of youths are gathered for an EDM festival, which quickly descends into carnage when one of the “parasytes” walks into the middle of the field, splays open its head into a tangle of organic tentacle blades and slices through the crowd.
Unlike the manga, which follows a high-school boy, the main character here is young female supermarket cashier Jung Soo-in (Jeon So-nee, Our Blooming Youth).

Soo-in has an altercation with a violent customer at work, who later waits for her outside. This man has just been egged on by some people online to kill someone and has chosen Soo-in as his target. He follows her to an abandoned road before attacking her.
Injured, she crawls into a field, right within striking distance of one of the alien parasyte balls. Before the man can kill her, the parasyte takes over Soo-in’s body and defends itself, slicing right through him. However, unlike the other parasytes, Soo-in still appears to be normal after the attack.
In the original, the parasyte takes over the lead character’s hand. Here, it takes over half of Soo-in’s head. Rather than talk directly to one another, the entities have to take turns controlling Soo-in’s body, although the parasyte can only do so for 15 minutes a day.

In Soo-in’s orbit is the kind local detective Cheol-min (Kwon Hae-hyo, Vigilante), who helped her out when she was a child, and she teams up with the wayward Seol Gang-woo (Koo Kyo-hwan, D.P.), who is on the run from gangsters.
Rounding out the cast is the grimacing agent Choi Joon-kyung (Lee Jung-hyun, Decision to Leave), who leads Team Grey, the government agency tasked with tracking down and killing the parasytes and who provides reams of exposition during a lengthy briefing to local law enforcement, of which Cheol-min is a part.
Yeon is most well known for crafting pulpy genre fare, but he started as a purveyor of grim indie animations with heavy social messages. Even after diving headfirst into the commercial arena, his best works have remained the ones that capture his cynical world view, such as Train to Busan with its commentary on corrupt governance, or Hellbound’s dark rebuke of idolatry.

Parasyte: The Grey lacks a similarly effective social message but, thankfully, it avoids the crass sentimentality of his weakest work, such as last year’s sci-fi dud Jung-E.
One social factor that does seem to interest Yeon here is humanity’s capacity for organisation. At one point, there is a parasyte who explains that, despite the aliens’ physical superiority, humans are more powerful than they are because of their ability to sacrifice for the good of an organisation.
Consequently, the parasytes try to organise and, while they cannot reproduce, their attempts to do so and to protect themselves echo the seminal alien invasion film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

While the show differentiates itself from the original, it does so by leaning into the style and tropes of Korean dystopian and creature horror, such as Sweet Home, that we have grown accustomed to.
Yeon’s adaptation lacks some of the fun of the manga, but still provides snatches of wicked entertainment and some inventive production design.
Although it is never less than an engaging watch, one hopes it can carve out its own distinct identity after the three episodes we are reviewing here.
Parasyte: The Grey will start streaming on Netflix on April 5.


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Netflix K-drama Parasyte: The Grey – Train to Busan’s Yeon Sang-ho adapts Japanese alien invasion manga

Jeon So-nee as Jeong Su-in in a still from Parasyte: The Grey. Photo: Cho Wonjin/Netflix

Jeon So-nee (centre) as Jeong Su-in in a still from Parasyte: The Grey. The K-drama series, directed by Train to Busan’s Yeon Sang-ho and co-starring Koo Kyo-hwan, Lee Jung-hyun and Kwon Hae-hyo, reimagines Hitoshi Iwaaki’s classic Japanese alien-invasion manga. Photo: Cho Wonjin/Netflix

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Jeon So-nee stars in Netflix show as a supermarket cashier who finds her body taken over by a ‘parasyte’ – part of an alien species that has invaded the planet
This adaptation of Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte lacks some of the fun of the original manga, but the aliens are suitably freakish and it is entertaining enough


The Train to Busan director’s Korean drama series for Netflix Parasyte: The Grey offers a sober, yet at times wickedly funny, take on Hitoshi Iwaaki’s classic Japanese manga about an alien invasion.
