K-drama review: Jirisan, despite starring Jun Ji-hyun and Ju Ji-hoon, is a baffling mountaineering drama that somehow squanders all its potential

This article contains spoilers.

1/5 stars

Early in the final episode of Jirisan, a ghost and a serial killer argue in a cave about whose side Jirisan is on, as if the titular mountain is backing their cause.

Much as this writer would love to share the punchline to that set-up, this isn’t a joke. It is a deadly serious exchange that takes place at a crucial moment in the denouement of what was one of the most hotly anticipated Korean dramas of the year.

Mountaineering dramas, with their ragged and treacherous backdrops, are naturally charged with suspense as characters put their lives at risk navigating dangerous terrain and changeable weather.

Jirisan supercharges an already very effective formula by presenting us with protagonists whose job is to save people in peril in the depths of the mountains. The daily lives of these mountain rangers will be filled with thrilling acts of heroism, we presume.

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Instead, the creators of this baffling production muddied the waters almost as soon as we were able to dip our toes in. Supernatural phenomena appeared in the opening episode in a misguided attempt to amplify the mythical aspects of South Korea’s Jirisan National Park, where the series is set.

Before long, these supernatural phenomena were driving a head-scratching investigation that seldom made sense, let alone beckoned us along the path of an exciting mystery.

An enormous number of characters had to die in mysterious circumstances before our intrepid – or is that inept? – mountain rangers/investigators cottoned on to the stunningly obvious fact that something was awry: killers were in their midst, lurking in the mountain mist.

That the murders were revenge killings stemming from a land redevelopment scheme that had ravaged the community decades earlier was a plot twist that was never going to elicit shock in even the most casual viewer of Korean dramas.

Jirisan is a very beautiful corner of the Earth, but as far as real estate speculators are concerned, Gangnam it certainly is not. The redevelopment deal involved installing a cable car high up in the mountains, not adding more glistening towers to an urban skyline.

The series’ narrative proceeds along three main timelines, one that begins in the present, another in 2018 and yet another in 1991, which emerges halfway through the series. When the cable car scheme emerges in the 1991 narrative, the show first throws us a red herring in the form of greedy, opportunistic outsiders looking to boot people out of their homes.

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Back to the present and, given how many people are killed and how closely connected they are to mountain rangers or the community, the clue to their deaths has to lie locally rather than in the supernatural – and sure enough, the victims all have links to residents who, back in 1991, wanted to take the developers’ money and conspired to force those holding out against the deal to sign away their land.

The main holdout was a stubborn beekeeper; after several other failed ploys, his greedy neighbours decide to poison his bees. When he discovers his livelihood has been destroyed, he goes insane and immediately begins experiencing auditory hallucinations of buzzing bees.

The man takes his own life and his son, Sol (Lee Ga-sub), who also hears imaginary bees, avenges him in the present. Bereft of any subtlety, mental illness is streamlined into a facile plot device.

Speaking of facile, for what turns out to be a simplistic and familiar storyline, Jirisan employs a needlessly Byzantine chronology which features extensive flashbacks on top of its triple timelines.

One of the big selling points of Jirisan was its star casting, with Jun Ji-hyun returning to lead a Korean drama four years after Legend of the Blue Sea, and Ju Ji-hoon of Kingdom and Along with the Gods fame taking on yet another lead in a big-budget, action-heavy production.

Neither of them get to play to their strengths – their characters are sidelined from the action for much of the series, with Jun, as Seo Yi-gang, confined to a wheelchair and Ju, as Kang Hyun-jo, simultaneously lying in hospital in a coma owing to a mysterious incident in the past and moping around the mountain as a ghost.

Given the silliness of much of the proceedings, it’s a huge shame that Jun doesn’t get the opportunity to flex her comedy skills more often. Her brand of cool and physical humour could have injected some much needed levity into a drab and dour series.

Of the two, Ju is given the more thankless role. While he gets to engage in some mild heroics in the extended flashbacks, the sad-sack ghost Hyun-jo becomes is a routine that few could pull off. Ju lacks the stoic, mournful magnetism of someone like Lee Byung-hun, but even he would have struggled with such an underwritten part.

In the end, the wheelchair-bound Yi-gang (Jun) hikes up the mountain on Commander Jo Daejin’s (Sung Dong-il) back to find the final clue to the murders. Later that day, during a rainy night, she battles the killer Sol with a helping hand from the sentient mountain, which kills the villain through a strategically placed mini rockslide.

A year later, Yi-gang is back on the mountainside, her legs intact again, staring across a crowd of hikers eager to catch the sunrise and into the eyes of Hyun-jo, who we had presumed dead the last time we saw him, when his family took him off life support the day the killer was caught.

Suffused with the light of the golden hour, this tableau strives for an epic and romantic note to close out the show. What it offers, however, is merely relief as this desultory story winds to a close.

Jirisan is streaming on iQiyi.