The prompt for this week brought the memory of this series almost immediately I saw it, a series that had me hooked from start to finish with fear and excitement mix. I had many reasons to see this series when I came across it, what I didn't know is the thrills and twists I'll have to go through, it was a lot more than I had expected.
This series opened my eyes to some things I had never tried to imagine, what happens to people who go to death and not death going to them (suicide), and trust kdrama directors to give death a beautiful face, Park So-dam was too beautiful for the image they were trying to portray but she played it so well with a "no smile" face.
How do one experience death for 12 times?!
I would almost scream at every scene the main character have to experience another death, "Death's Game" didn't hold back in the different ways to die, plane crash, fire outbreak, gunshot and even misfortunate paragliding. Did you ask what the thrilling story in "Death's Game" is?
Choi Yee-jae (starred by Seo In-guk), a young guy out of his unbearable life's misfortunes and despair commits suicide hoping that everything will end with his death. He is confronted by death (starred by Park So-dam) in front of the gate to hell. He is punished to experience death 12 more times in different bodies, he has to survive in one of the bodies to stop the death and not go to hell.
Even after watching a trailer, I still got the chills and intensity of the series when I started to see it, right from the moment he is faced with death, who is so angry "Don't Go Looking For Death. Death Will Come Find You" is like her slogan but Yee-jae obviously acted against this and so, her anger and the punishment to teach him a lesson.
In the different bodies he had to live and die in, the story takes us on a thrilling journey, how he struggles to survive in each body while he learned of more ways to outsmart death and win in the end. He woke up in the body of a rich guy, a weak high school boy, a convict, a mobster and even a baby and he had to find ways to survive.
Even I felt death cheated him when he woke up in the body of a baby and in the body of a guy paragliding for fun at the risk of his own life, the death in those two bodies were so quick that he couldn't even try to survive in them... Death's game indeed. I had the chills when he woke up in the body of the convict, "Lee Jae-Wook" from the "Alchemy of Souls" was so perfect for that role.
The 8 episode series have a mix of action, romance and horror all in fiction. It's not something we think can happen in our reality but that didn't make it less thrilling to see how it would be play out it were possible. It's one of the movies to warn people off suicide attempts, the risk of being punished again and this cruelly.
To review this series now, I had to watch a few trailers and clips from it on YouTube and I'm reminded of how I kept wondering what the next life for the main character be like. When I thought Death was the villain in this series, it turned out there's an evil human to watch out for, well played by Kim Ji-hoon, another tense to the story.
I'll highly recommend this series for thrill lovers, it's an exciting one with no boring episodes like some kdrama tend to have. The characters played their role well, the cinematography is good and I'll rate it a 8.5/10 for the superb storyline and fair enough ending with lessons learnt. My entry to the Cinetv Contest and you're invited.