Review: ‘Dr. Brain, Your ‘New South Korean TV Lover’

“Dr. Brain” didn’t get the launch you’d expect for a mini-series by a prominent South Korean filmmaker, which is a key building block in Apple TV+’s attempt to elevate its international content. The show’s Thursday debut It was announced less than two weeks ago, and even then, there was confusion as to the actual date it would be released in the United States. Ritual press day with cast and crew announced on Tuesday takes place in a week after that preview.

Apparently this lack of planning could be the result of Apple focusing its attention on airing the show in South Korea; Created by “Dr. Brain”. Kim Jee-woonis the service’s first original series in that country. But it’s hard not to suspect another culprit: Netflix’s “Squid Game” and the sudden avalanche of interest it brought to the South Korean television series. Maybe someone at Apple woke up and said, “Hey, we have them too!” said.

And what they have is relatively quiet and only slightly sensationally better. It’s not the quiet and unsentimental qualities always associated with Kim, who is happy to commit excessively gory or extravagant acts in movies like “I Saw the Devil” and “The Good, the Bad, the Weird.” “Dr. Brain” operates in a calmer, more subtle mode reminiscent of his best work, the polished horror movie. “A tale of two sisters.”

Kim has been a genre-hopper in her career, and the six-episode “Dr. His first television series, Brain, blends the formats he has worked with before. At its core, it’s a simple mystery as brain scientist Sewon Koh (Lee Sun-kyun) searches for the son he thought he had buried but might still be alive; He is helped by Lieutenant Choi (Seo Ji-hye), a police officer who is initially skeptical but turns to his side.

But it’s also a sci-fi story: Koh developed a process for “synchronizing brain waves” that allows the recently deceased to access their memories. His son’s fate is entwined with a conspiracy involving this technology, with “Dr. Brain” at the extreme end with Dr. Frankenstein, the helmet and electrode thrillers of the mid-1980s “Brainstorm” and “Dreamscape” at the lower end.

Embroider a film noir in the person of a concise special eye (Park Hee-soon), who also helps Koh, and you have a kind of stew. And that’s before we get to the mind-merging sequences of Koh, where murder victims, random corpses and, in one comic sequence, a dead cat go inside their heads. Kim sees these as opportunities to inject visual pizazz in the form of giallo and Asian-horror motifs into the naturalistic mise-en-scène in general. Finally, it would be a shame not to say that fusing with the cat gives Koh the occasional access to the cat’s vision and agility powers, making him a part-time superhero.

This is “Dr. The “brain” sounds like a mess, but it’s surprisingly consistent. Who’s in tight control – his unobtrusive professionalism ensures that shocks, reversals and revelations are part of a smooth, modulated ride. And that fluency takes you beyond the nagging questions that such stories tend to pop up, often involving why someone doesn’t do the obvious.

For some viewers, the main barrier to entry may be the emotionality of the season’s beginning and ending – the need for Korean TV dramas to portray themselves as soap operas to meet the expectations of domestic viewers. But Kim pours less syrup than the norm, and for most of her run, “Dr. Brain” is classy and immersive entertainment.