‘The Frog’ is a delightfully grim revenge tale

This is intercut with events 20 years prior—a time jump cemented by a big box copy of the video game StarCraft that does the rounds—as earnest-to-a-fault Koo Sang-jun (Yoon Kye-sang) unknowingly welcomes serial killer Ji Hyang-cheol (Hong Ki-joon) to his similarly idyllic motel. When the killer carries the body of a woman to his room, past a sleeping Sang-jun and his son Go-hi (Choi Jung-hoo), the lives of the Koo family are irreparably damaged.

At first, the only clear link between these two men—apart from a slew of serial murders—is a police officer, Yoon Bo-min (Ha Yoon-kyung). A powerless, if shrewd, figure in the dissolution of Sang-jun’s life in the wake of the murder, she returns in the present as captain (now played by Lee Jung-eun) and her instinct for murder keeps leading her to Yeong-ha and his beautiful rental home.

Her presence doesn’t stop these shifts in time from feeling strange—impenetrable, though compelling, in their separation. Rather, The Frog trusts its audience to persevere beneath the layers of revenge that shudder through the series, to slowly understand that we are watching the same story play out in two ways. 

For, in many ways, Sang-jun and Yeong-ha are the same. Both are assailed by the aftermath of murder, both forced into the role of unwitting accomplice, and both flawed ordinary people thrust into the most extraordinary of circumstances. Yet, while The Frog weaves through their similarities, it later uses the former character to inform the latter—where Sang-jun is powerless in the path of a perceived fate, Yeong-ha learns to be an immovable object in the face of Seong-ah’s inexorable violence.

It makes the comparison to The Glory somewhat unfair. Though The Frog is not shy about how much it owes to previous series—not least in how much Seong-ah resembles Dong-eun, or moreso Inspector Koo’s K (Kim Hye-jun)—in Yeong-ha’s stubborn resistance to revenge, even as Sang-jun’s son (played in the present by Park Chan-yeol) plans his own, The Frog happily shies away from how so many similar series seem to celebrate the violence that surrounds bad people receiving their comeuppance. Even in those moments where the dam does break, it rarely feels cathartic—only tragic.

In that way, nothing in The Frog feels like an end. These events will stay with the surviving characters for the rest of their lives. Because, while The Frog is a thriller, it is also laced with an ambiguous horror that ties it closer to Na Hong-jin’s remarkable folk horror The Wailing, or last year’s Revenant. We as viewers know what has happened—we are sure of it—but we, too, begin to doubt. The threat of uncertainty haunts us as much as it does Yeong-ha. This is entrenched into The Frog by director Mo Wan-il’s tendency to linger on the lonely vistas around Yeong-ha’s home, the dense forest, and the road to his pension that ends in a sharp anonymous bend. It’s beguiling scenery, but one can’t help but wonder what may lay in wait—what might rumble up that blind bend—ready to announce itself in one of The Frog’s many violent bursts.

That same verve is applied to Yeong-ha’s community, who melt into the saturated streets as if they’ve been there all along. We get a real sense of a group of people who are happy and helpless in their own lives, who need a dramatic jolt to shake them from their inertia. None moreso than Yeong-ha, a widower who lives a life of memories and past lives, removed from his daughter (Roh Yoon-seo) who works as a pharmacist in Seoul. For better or worse, when Seong-ah’s violence enters his life, he finds a sympathetic, even kindred, spirit in her too.

It’s that interplay that drags The Frog from a beautiful bloody thriller into something that stays with you. Many will walk away from the series with Go Min-si’s performance in mind, as this wide-eyed, frantic woman whose only reaction to not getting her way is violence. But it is how that bristling energy plays off Kim Yoon-seok’s crumbling reticence that makes The Frog more humane than its predecessors.

If Kim as Yeong-ha sometimes feels flat by comparison to what we’re used to in K-dramas—whether that’s flashy men or gratuitous violence—it feels deliberate. He brings a subtle rhythm to a character viscerally unable to deal with his own grief, even as it becomes frightfully present in Seong-ah. His slow and steady transformation—from a man willing to put up with anything, to having had enough—lacks the flash and suddenness of other male leads in K-dramas, but it brings something deeper and more affecting to his delightfully macabre exchanges with Seong-ah.

The Frog is a series that pulls away from those traditions just enough. In its place, it creates something more visually stunning and relatable. It doesn’t exactly reinvent the Korean thriller, there’s plenty here for fans of past hits like The Glory. But it skirts that fine line between asking new questions to bring a human tone to a genre with so little variation and never feeling derivative in its debt to its past. Rather, through stunning filmmaking and powerful performance, from the well-worn bones of its predecessors it fashions a thriller that is just as stylish, but more compelling, even more vulnerable, and—unlike Seong-ah—never overstays its welcome.