Youn’s Stay: Parasite’s Choi Woo-shik joins the cast of charming Korean reality show spin-off
- When Covid-19 put paid to the third season of Youn’s Kitchen, Youn Yuh-jung decamped to a hanok homestay
- With the help of some famous friends, she hosts foreign guests already in South Korea
Travel may still be more vicarious than existential in these challenging times. But for a lucky few the pandemic has meant a more exclusive, personalised experience than they might otherwise have sampled – plus supporting roles in a reality-television show.
Youn’s Stay (Now TV, channel 155, Wednesdays at 11pm) offers foreign guests already in South Korea the comforts of a bona fide hanok (traditional Korean house) homestay in rural Gurye county, west of Busan – albeit one in which they’re followed around by cameras.
The new series is a spin-off from abandoned show Youn’s Kitchen (Covid-19 filming difficulties put paid to its third season) but it retains much of the cast, including Youn Yuh-jung, who has now become a guest house boss. Newcomer Choi Woo-shik (of Parasite fame) here functions as a sort of English-speaking liaison officer for visitors.
Although it might look like a walk in the park, Youn’s Stay ends up being anything but for the actors, who have to muck in and tackle the real work of running the homestay. Cleaning, cooking, collecting guests and explaining the niceties of Korean culture to Dutchmen, Australians and Ukrainians are all part of the “job”.
As for the walk in the park, well, that’s currently being enjoyed by the hanok owners – already inundated with reservations enquiries.
The Rook – HBO Go presents a slick espionage thriller with sci-fi characteristics
A young woman lying on a pavement wakes up from some sort of attack. Rain is pouring, so it’s evidently Britain. Actually, she’s below London’s Millennium Bridge, where she finds herself surrounded by bodies. So she does the obvious thing and runs away.
Which is something Myfanwy Thomas (played by Emma Greenwell) does a great deal of in the eight-episode debut series of The Rook (HBO Go, instalments added on Mondays), a slick, new-to-Asia espionage thriller with sci-fi characteristics.
Myfanwy seems to be a paper-shuffler in a particularly secretive branch of Britain’s secret service. In truth she’s a lethal weapon who can zap enemies electrically with the force of a renegade power station. She’s one of a bunch of paranormal recruits harnessed for their peculiar abilities by the state – by which she is naturally being manipulated.
But Myfanwy lost her memory in the incident that dumped her by the Thames and consequently she has no way of telling her friends from the enemies (in her own organisation) who set her up to be cut down at the Millennium Bridge. And so she runs from those who might wish her further ill, those who might help her and those just in it for their own reward, realising that the only person she can trust is herself. If only she knew who she was.
With its choice of blue key or red key, recorded messages to a pre-amnesiac self, and a creepy quartet of siblings all plugged in to their private hive mind, The Rook acknowledges The Village of the Damned, Total Recall, The Matrix and various Terminator movies while remaining an espionage thriller set mainly in a recognisable present day.
Predictably, spooks from the United States have their say in proceedings – not least because big-ticket productions such as this often require American money if they are to be made. But luckily that gives us a turn from Olivia Munn as tenacious agent Monica Reed, who has undeclared talents of her own.
Munn, part-Chinese and raised partly in Tokyo, has experience in the realms of the devious, having starred as psychic slayer Psylocke in X-Men Apocalypse (2016). Here she may be a mere pawn on the bloody board of someone else’s deadly game, or perhaps a vindictive queen out to avenge the horrific extermination of an erstwhile partner. Either way, it’s her move.
