Don’t Sleep on ‘Revenant,’ a Masterful K-Horror Series on Disney+

Revenant, like so many horror stories, begins on a rainy night. Disney+’s latest South Korean drama opens as Professor Gu Kang-mo (Jin Seon-kyu) hurries through his front door, past shelves piled with books, and barricades himself in the study. “What went wrong?” he asks himself, flipping through his notes. Behind him, visible through paper windows, flashes of lightning illuminate a shadowy figure — its hair writhing in a wide halo like snakes.

Moments later, Gu is dead and we cut to what appears to be an unrelated scene. Rushing from the light of a train station, San-yeong (Kim Tae-ri) steps into a still Seoul night, surrounded by murmuring voices, and climbs onto the railing of a bridge. Below which, folklore professor Yeom Hae-sang (Oh Jung-sae) drinks beer and discusses suicide with a young man in school uniform. As shadowy tendrils slither across the surface of the water and toward the bridge, Yeom jumps up and sprints to the railing, trying to reach the woman before she jumps. He fails. Shadows claim the jumper and a passerby, but it’s not San-yeong.

It’s a sharp introduction to the ambiguity that haunts Revenant. Within its twisting avenues of mystery, we can’t always be certain that people are who they appear to be or that doors will lead where we think.

All three of these characters are linked, in spirit if not currently in time. It’s not until the spirit haunting Gu passes to his daughter, San-yeong, that she even meets Yeom — at which point, we start asking what the taciturn professor is hiding. How many of Gu’s actions were his own? Most of all, we’re left asking whether the spirits that flutter through each episode are frightening at all or simply a window into more relatable horrors. Invoking the tragedy that afflicts the living after a death, the startling economic inequality at the heart of many South Korean dramas, and the pressure to maintain etiquette in the face of overwhelming stress, it makes for uncomfortably realistic horror.

It’s unsurprising from writer Kim Eun-hee, whose seminal police drama, Signal, was possessed of a similar structure (using real-life crime rather than folklore) while the more action-oriented Kingdom revolved around a pillar of layered mystery. Kim is the master of expanding on common tropes with just enough originality as to transcend the traditions that inform her work.

Revenant is no different. It can’t claim to do anything new, but with the assuredness with which it blends detective drama and horror, Kim has given Disney+ its first real competitor to Netflix’s own originals. 

Shades of Ringu, Dark Water, The Wailing, even The Host are visible in Revenant. In particular, it cleverly evokes the investigative throughline of Hideo Nakata’s horror classic, Ringu. And yet, at no point in its twelve episodes does Revenant feel like a copy, more the culmination of that rich vein of horror. 

Kim Eun-hee’s writing drives the ship, but Revenant is anchored by Kim Tae-ri, who expertly balances San-yeong and the malicious spirit within her. Her wealth of expression contrasts beautifully with Oh Jung-se’s hyper-focused Professor Yeom, with whom she teams up to release her from the curse — and maybe bust a few ghosts along the way. Moving parallel to them, detectives Seo Mun-chun (Kim Won-hae) and Lee Hong-sae (Hong Kyung) try their damnedest to connect the murders San-yeong’s ghostly self leaves in her wake.

Not that these characters are as disparate as they initially appear. All share a history, and all play an important part in an intricate web of interpersonal relationships that are a hallmark of Kim’s work — a web that lends Revenant a human touch that feels so fresh in an era of cold, franchised horror in the West.

At first, the series of ghosts in Revenant play like a greatest hits of K-horror — grisly reflections in the mirror, swarms of spooky insects, small blue hands that quickly disappear — before evolving to form part of a wider, tragic story that informs not just San-yeong’s understanding of the world she’s entered, but our own. Yeom and San-yeong visit a grandmother who has unleashed restless spirits onto her village because she wants to see her daughter again, a child abused by his parents who won’t pass on until his sister is safe, and a childhood friend whose situation forms a premonition of San-yeong’s. Even the spirit within San-yeong can shift between vengeful and a welcome — albeit murder-y — outlet for her frustrations.

Revenant paints the world around us as both deeply spiritual and perpetually haunted — a perspective which feels remarkably fresh when held against the clear definitions that exist between human and monster in Western horror (and an industry increasingly reliant on cheap jump scares).

This is perhaps because Revenant, despite its reliance on an especially tight thriller plot, embodies a style of horror we, in the West, have largely forgotten. Kim Eun-hee and series director Lee Jung-rim understand that horror is supposed to frighten us. They use the series’ runtime to build tension and create a sense of dread that never truly lets up. 

Yes, it has its unoriginal moments, but in addition to its myriad terrors, Revenant can also be goofy and absurd, even joyful and heartfelt. It is, more than anything, human, and a reminder that South Korea just does horror so much better than we do.

From Rolling Stone US.