Korean Series at the Canneseries 2024

This year’s Cannes International Series Festival, aka Canneseries 2024, runs from April 5th to 10th. The festival features screenings of some of the best international series, featuring two upcoming Korean shows: Tarot and Pleasant Outcast. The category’s first Korean entrant, Tarot, is competing in the Short Form Competition, while Pleasant Outcast is in the non-competitive Korean Series Focus segment.

The seven-episode omnibus horror thriller series—directed by Ashbun—Tarot is covered in shocks and weird inexplicable events that catch you off guard now and then while people in Seoul go about their daily lives. The stories share one element in common: the recurring aspect of the characters uncovering a tarot card in each episode that spirals things out of control. As the plots evolve, the characters find that the reality around them is growing bizarre, unfathomable, even—not what the cards may have hinted at.

Santa’s Visit, the third episode of Tarot, is one of the seven episodes in the short-format competition, reports The Korea Herald. Santa’s Visit has Ji-woo (Cho Yeo-jeong), a single mother, and her daughter in the grip of a string of perplexing incidents on Christmas.

This Korean anthology series explores the divide between rationality and absurdity by bringing together fear and tarot, according to a Canneseries press release. A wonderful metaphor for life, tarot cards are fate readers with dual meanings. The show expertly plays on horror while making it hard to discern what’s real and what’s just in one’s imagination.

Pleasant Outcast at Canneseries’ non-competitive Korean Series Focus section is a dystopian suspense drama of 10 episodes based on the first installment of the famed webtoon Pleasant Bullying by Kim Soong-nyung. The series recounts Dong Hyun’s experiences with severe bullying at his school. Disgusted and traumatized, he hopes for everyone’s death when the school building crumbles out of nowhere, exposing the worst in people as the disaster becomes a test of survival. 

The narrative follows a similar trajectory to that of Concrete Utopia (2023), South Korea’s submission for the Best International Feature Film category of the 96th Academy Awards. The movie, starring Lee Byung-hun, Park Seo-joon, and Park Bo-young and directed by Um Tae-hwa, originates from the second installment of Pleasant Bullying. It dwells on the lone unscathed residential building occupants in the wake of a cataclysmic earthquake that wrecks Seoul and leaves the entirety in ruins.

Much like Concrete Utopia, Pleasant Outcast portrays people (students in this case) marooned in a dire predicament. They must rework their positions and leadership roles as things get harsher to sustain themselves in the face of mishaps and run-ins.