The School Nurse Files: Netflix K-drama takes on the supernatural and succeeds
- Whimsical fantasy-comedy stars Jung Yu-mi as a lightsaber-wielding superhero school nurse
The most excruciating moment of the school year – for boys – was the “cough and drop”, performed for the school nurse. Its intricacies need not detain us here, but at least we were fairly sure the nurse had little outlandish talent for envisaging jellied blobs of greed or discerning coloured auras around our heads. She never wielded a lightsaber in anger either.
But in The School Nurse Files, now streaming on Netflix, Ahn Eun-young (Jung Yu-mi) possesses the sort of superpowers that take her into battle against small, wobbly villains, colossal monsters and doubting colleagues – because she alone can see the terrors all around and the horrors that lurk in Korean school basements full of aggressive goo. Well, somebody has to save the education system.
Staff pin-up and Chinese teacher Hong In-pyo (Nam Joo-hyuk) is Eun-young’s love interest in this whimsically appealing action, fantasy, comedy series – or will be if she remembers that ectoplasmic splatter isn’t a good look.
HBO’s The Third Day – a frightening fairy tale for our times
Sam is having a bad day. A few bad days, actually. Make that a year, or two. Sam (Jude Law in a bravura performance) is a victim of circumstance, fate and his own unhingedness, all of which point to his being the unwitting centrepiece of a modern pagan pantomime.
Trapped in a de facto republic whose founding principles are a collection of corny Celtic myths, Sam has been sucked into an arcane dispute that will cost him much more than his sanity. But Sam isn’t all he seems and isn’t averse to some big-money bribery, infidelity or seriously erratic behaviour.
Beware The Third Day (HBO and HBO Go, new episodes on Tuesdays), with its weird world of horror, mystery and bloody sacrifice on one of those eerie estuarial islands in which Britain seems to specialise and where time seems mummified.
Sam’s biggest problem, which he takes a partly LSD-obscured age to realise, is that the islanders contriving to keep him on their manor are one grubbily white-suited, flaky godhead figure short of a kumbaya picnic: a job for which he, as a paranoid seer of visions, has no interest in applying.
Devotees of movie The Wicker Man (the original version, thank you) and Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse will have fun comparing geek notes on what it all really means. Offering clues are a supremely oleaginous Paddy Considine as a publican pulling pints of verbal treacle while continually being slapped into place by a blunt-speaking Emily Watson as the scheming pub landlady.
“We’re all people of God here,” proclaims one loopy shotgun-toting local, while Sam, in a lucid moment, decries their “magic and pixies and fake gods”. To no avail he tries to warn them “this shit [they] believe in” won’t heal a world gone wrong.
Just when it looks like some sort of handle has been established on this oddball caper, the focus abruptly shifts. An unexpected arrival on the island suddenly becomes the centre of attention as the tension rises a notch, or 10; she has stumbled into this parable of the moral decay of civilisation and can look forward to “mayhem, chaos and havoc” as one hayseed puts it. It’s unclear whether pictures of Jack the Ripper’s victims, pasted to a wall, are meant as a warning or a training aid.
Sinister, chilling and discomfitingly familiar, The Third Day is a fairy tale for our times that packs considerable wallop – as you might expect from a series whose production credits list Ridley Scott’s company and one Brad Pitt.
