Letter #77: Revenant

Good morning, Erin.

Something you would have no reason to know about me is the significance that The X-Files played in my personal history, the way it held me together during my uneasy high school years, the way it kept my sisters and me company for those years when my mother had to leave us to our own devices while she worked late, the way it (in part) influenced the earliest part of my solidifying worldview. It was as much pastime as bulwark, a grounding point not just for my imagination but for a soul constantly on the brink of being overwhelmed. I owe it a lot, in that regard, and miss it dearly. 

…which is what I’d like to say compelled me to start this horror-y/investigate-y series, but I don’t think there’s a personal story deep enough, vulnerable enough to convince you it isn’t just because I’m a bit enamored with Kim Tae-ri and am willing to wander wherever she points. Even a quick glance at my notes would undermine my assertions, as I repeatedly exult her as “angelic” and “radiant” in one margin or another. 

Alas, my poet’s heart: ever susceptible to beauty.

So…yeah, I watched Revenant, and I’d like to share some of my thoughts, on the off-chance you’d like to hear them. (No spoilers, of course.)

1. Just for the record, I only wrote out “YES SEXY EVIL KIM TAE-RI” one time, so I really didn’t spend a lot of time being a lovesick fanboy. Seriously. I like her as an actress, and I thought the show sounded interesting enough. That really was all there was to—f***, I’ve just turned to my second page of notes where I’ve written it a second time. Okay, two times, but that’s it!

2. Is this show any good? The answer is…yes. It’s not great, but it’s a good, suitably creepy show. There are flaws at the writing level (such as the mechanics of the main supernatural elements of the story), and it starts much more slowly than you’d hope, but things really pick up steam in the latter half, flaws and all. Plus, the actors are all good. So, overall, it’s certainly entertaining enough to recommend. If you like spooky or spooky-adjacent things. (I’d say it’s somewhere between spooky and spooky-adjacent, just for the record. It never goes too far, never tries to scare the pants off you or sustain fear in the audience for long periods of time, but it certainly tries to unsettle you, from time to time—though for dramatic story reasons rather than “horror movie” reasons.)

2A. Speaking of the writing not being quite up to par, though—this series was written by the woman who wrote Kingdom, which was AWESOME. So…I dunno, maybe this one just needed another rewrite or two. Or maybe there was another writer who was more in charge of the writing. Or maybe writing is hard. 

3. I was initially confused by why this show had a dozen trigger warnings slapped onto the front of every episode, but then the terrible, closed caption for the deaf-style subtitles kicked in, and I was reminded that this was being broadcast on Disney+. Would they have been on there if it weren’t? Maybe. But I choose to blame Disney+. 

4. Did you know I noted down all the actors I recognized? You did? Well, five points to Erindor!

• Hee-do from Twenty-Five, Twenty-One as San-young, our female protagonist

• the autistic brother from It’s Okay to Not be Okay as Professor Yeom, our male protagonist

• the baker who killed the blind ghost in Hotel Del Luna as a cop, our other male protagonist

• Sanchez from Hotel Del Luna as a shaman (Woo! HDL mini-reunion!)

• the goofy town leader from The Good Bad Mother as the cop’s older partner

• Grandma from Start-Up as Professor Yeom’s grandmother

• Goth Girl from Nevertheless as Se-mi, San-young’s friend (and #BestGirl)

• the spry mystery man from Kingdom as a phishing scam, um, scammer guy

• little Ji-eum from See You in My 19th Life as a little girl from 1958

• IU’s janitor friend in My Mister as a town elder

• the plump team manager from Secretary Kim as a fussy forensics guy

• Other Secretary Kim from Secretary Kim as an instagram celeb (Woo! Sec. Kim mini-reunion!)

• the little girl version of the daughter in Crash Course in Romance as little San-young

• Mun’s spirit-partner woman from The Uncanny Counter as a shaman

4A. Y’know how I figured out Se-mi was the Goth Girl from Nevertheless? I kept waffling on whether or not I thought she was hot. Which is exactly what I did during Nevertheless. 

4A₁. …seriously, though, she brought such a fun energy to an otherwise very, very serious story, and I was so happy to see that she wasn’t just a one-off guest spot. There wasn’t anywhere near enough of her, and I must have written that in my notes a dozen times. She was easily #BestGirl, no matter how hard I was crushing on Kim Tae-ri throughout the series. 

4B. That I had just come from seeing the older cop as the goofy town leader from The Good Bad Mother made it very hard to take his sage veteran detective very seriously, at first. 

4C. It turns out that Sanchez from Hotel Del Luna was also one of the main characters in Inspector Koo, a show that was so bad, it blinded me to how one of its leads was someone I totally recognized. 

5. When it wants to be, this show can be really slick or sly with a storytelling element. One in particular is done very, very subtly, and you can pick up on it well before an explanation is given—indirectly—an episode or two later. And it’s a detail that stays throughout the series, always in subtle ways. I dunno how much is the script, the actors, or the director, but it’s great—especially when they do an EVEN SUBTLER explanation of why the explanation is the way it is in the last or second-to-last episode. Suuuuuch a good detail. 

6. Professor Yeom looks good running. A bit of the Tom Cruise school in his style. Good job. (Or should I say…good jog.)

7. San-yeong doesn’t look quite as good running. But she’s more than passable. So, I consider that a win. 

8. The main spook is essentially an invisible entity for almost the entire run of the show, and the first time we actually manage to see it, its…modus operandi, let’s say, makes much more sense. It’s a really clever reveal. 

9. Less clever is the CGI work that’s done to edit out bits of…well, stuff that is obviously in the shot but needs to not be there for supernatural reasons. It looks fake as all get-out. Which is especially sad in one case when the attention to detail it takes to remember this visual editing is needed for a particular scene to be narratively accurate is overshadowed by how crap it looks. Because they absolutely could have gotten away with ignoring this detail, but the bad CGI is the only thing that called attention to the fact that it needed to be taken care of. (Seriously, no one would have noticed the inconsistency.)

10. You know I like a little kid version of an adult character who actually resembles the adult actor. And the little girl version of San-yeong…I don’t necessarily think I can easily see her growing up to look like Kim Tae-ri, but she definitely has the same…if not the same facial expressions, exactly, then the same look to her facial expressions. Regardless, I thought they did some good casting, there. 

11. I can’t tell if San-yeong's mom was written well or badly or acted well or badly. Or maybe it’s just that we don’t have much explanation for why she’s acting the way she is, even when they do broadly tell us why. Like, it’s such a broad explanation, and it doesn’t really doesn’t give the right number of details. Or maybe it’s just me. 

12. Y-You see a face in the wall in this screenshot, too, right?

←right there…you see it, right? Right?

13. The poor production team has a dramatic episode that depends on there being a rain storm…and the day they’re filming is sooooooo bright and sunny. They absolutely have that rain machine going like mad, but there’s no hiding that it’s a gorgeous day out. 

14. Similarly, there’s a scene where it’s important that our protagonists get to a place where they’ll be able to see the sunrise—and they do, but it’s obvious that the scene is being filmed in the middle of the night and it’s pitch black out…so the light from the “sunrise” is very obviously just a spotlight being shown on the actors. Like, it really does look like a big flashlight beam is being pointed at Kim Tae-ri, and it’s so silly.

14A. As silly as how the very next shot of them admiring the sunrise is just them staring at greenscreen? Oh, much sillier.  

15. This show ends up being really similar to a fantastic comic book series by one of the few authors I still generally think of as consistently good: The Black Monday Murders. Definitely recommend it, if you’re looking to get into something dark and compelling. 

16. At one point in the series, it becomes very obvious that San-yeong has a calculator watch, and I couldn’t tell if this was a sign of a change in her character or if she’d had it the whole time. 

17. I totally figured out some of the biggest twists and turns as the story reached its climax, because I am the world’s greatest detective. 

18. …just like how I was able to suss out that the subtitles were lying to me about the translation of something they were describing from afterlife-related lore: the subtitle said “the River Styx,” but I totally heard them say Sanzu (Samho? I genuinely can’t remember), which is the name of the river they cross that wipes their memories in Hotel Del Luna. You can’t fool me, show!

18A. What’s particularly interesting about this, to me, is that the dialogue that immediately follows the name of the river (the River Styx, in the subtitles) explains what the river is: “Oh, you mean the river between out world and the afterlife?” San-yeong asks. So, like, you could have kept the original name and just, y’know, used the explanation that immediately followed it to explain it. But, hey, what do I know. 

19. More credit where it’s due: the hair and makeup people did a really good job making one of the characters look a lot like one of the other characters without them actually looking all that much alike. 

20. This show marks the second time I’ve watched an overlong sequence of Kim Tae-ri cleaning an old house. (This, and Little Trees.)

20A. I don’t think she did any cleaning in The Handmaiden. Like, unless you count wiping…um…her face. Of…substances. 

21. I’ve mentioned that the mechanics of the spooky stuff don’t always seem to work the way they are described to, but there’s a specific spooky plot element that doesn’t track AT ALL—like, it’s not just something that’s obviously going to achieve the opposite of the intended goal, but it’s also just there to allow one character to get access to information he wouldn’t have otherwise. And they hope you’re just going to be too distracted by all the action to notice. Well, guess who noticed, show! You should have sent Kim Tae-ri in a short skirt if you were going to distract the world’s greatest detective! Er, that is, y-you were never going to fool me!

22. There is an almost amateurishly heavy-handed literary reference in one of the episodes. Like, I don’t know who could possibly miss it, it’s that blatant. And I’d hate to think any of the people making this show thought it was especially clever. Maybe amusing in a deliberately-bad sense, but…oof, I raised an eyebrow at that, let me tell you. 

23. Again, all the actors do a good job. I know there’s some buzz about Kim Tae-ri’s performance being award-worthy, but I dunno that I agree with that (like, for my money, Ji-eum in 19th Life gives a better performance)—though I think she was very good and arguably the best in the series. Regardless of the scale of how good she is, though, I want to make note that she manages to consistently do something very minor but very specific (and significant) throughout her performance that really, really brings an extra little something to her character. Whether this is her or the director making sure she does it, I couldn’t say. But she does it very naturally, even though it is very deliberate. So…credit where it’s due. I’ve said in other letters that I think she’s an actress who will give you 100% of what’s in the script, good or bad, but this might be one where she’s able to bring a little something extra to it. And congrats to any and all who are responsible for her being able to do that. 

23A. Also, did I mention she’s pretty? ‘Cus she’s pretty.

23B. [wink]

24. Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure this whole story is some kind of allegory for…something. I can’t quite say what I’d guess it is. But, by the end, I very much felt like I’d been tricked into a very long metaphor. 

25. Sure, all the Volkswagen logos can get waved in our face, but noooooo not the Hyundai logos.

26. And don’t think I didn’t notice the thing with the coats at the end, show. You didn’t get that one past me, either. I caught all your tricks!

And that was Revenant. Without spoilers, at least. 

Hard to imagine, I know, but I managed not to totally screw up a pick of my own. Unbelievable. 

What’ll we have up next? I dunno. Could be Mr. Queen. Could be a mystery. Could be Heart Signal 4, except it won’t be over for another month, so it won’t be that, and also WHY AREN’T YOU WATCHING IT ERIN WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT HOW GOOD IT IS. (Yeah, I know, you’re not going to—but you still owe me Alchemy of Souls!)

In other news, I got a friend of mine to start Sweet Home. He gave up on Vincenzo almost immediately, so we’ll see if this one sticks. (Early signs are good, since he’s already a little in love with Guitar Girl. As he should be.)

Hope your July was a lot less stressful than your June. And that your August is even less stressful than that. 

Wait, I can just see what the YouTube tarot card readers say about Aries, this month. Duh. 

—Daryl