by Michael McCarthy
I have another amazing Korean series to tell you about. This one is called Death’s Game and it’s exclusively on Prime in the U.S. It’s an 8 episode limited series. And I can promise you that it will blow you away. Without giving too much away, I’ll tell you that it begins with a young man committing suicide. He has a mother and girlfriend who love him, but it’s been seven years since he finished school and he has been unable to find a professional job. Instead, he’s had to scrape by with what he makes from part-time jobs. I can’t remember which part-time jobs he had specifically, but there were a bunch of them. The sort of jobs that anyone without a college degree could get. In any case, he feels like a complete failure. For seven years he’s gone to regular job interviews and he’s never been hired. So he finally makes the unfortunate decision to kill himself. After he does this, he finds himself in a very dark place. And that place is Death’s lair. Death, who he sees as a woman (not her true form), tells him that he’s offended her by coming to see her before she called him. Turns out death does not like people committing suicide. To punish this young man, Death says that he has to live 12 different lives and die every time. And these are all horrible, painful deaths. He gets sent back to earth and takes over the body of someone else. He gets their memories and abilities, but at the same time he’s still himself. But Death does tease him about something: if he can survive in one of these lives, he can continue to live out that person’s life until they eventually die from whatever they would have died from whenever that was meant to happen. The question is: can he really beat death and survive in one of these lives?
The first life he experiences when he gets back is that of someone who’s about to die in an airplane mishap. He becomes that person just minutes before they’re doomed to go up in flames and there’s nothing he can possibly do to survive that death. Which makes him think that Death might be lying to him about him being able to potentially survive one of the deaths she has in store for him. Still, he’s a smart guy and he’s not going down without a fight. A few lives into all of this, he finds that the people he’s becoming are interconnected. Some of them are people he’s had no previous contact with. Others he met in some capacity. But rather than simply trying to survive the deaths that are in store for these people, our protagonist decides to right some wrongs and get some revenge. Some of it is non-linear. For example, after experiencing a certain death, some deaths later he finds himself living out the life of someone else who was involved in that person’s death. So he starts making very clever moves to position himself to better beat Death at her game and at the same time get revenge on some of the people who kill him in his 12 lives. He also does things to try to minimize the pain that his girlfriend and mother are in following his suicide.
The other thing is that he has to figure out what he did so wrong by killing himself. Basically, why Death and God consider that a sin. If I’m remembering it correctly, if he figured that out and repented then he could avoid going to hell after experiencing his 12 deaths.
Maybe I’m making it sound too confusing. Then again, this is a series that makes you think. In some respects it’s almost like a time travel movie because certain things impact other things like dominoes falling as the lives he takes over and dies in fit together in interesting ways. Ultimately, I would say it’s a revenge story first and a story about righting wrongs and redemption second. In any case, it’s truly brilliant. First of all, the screenwriting will blow your mind. Meanwhile, it’s extremely well directed like a big Hollywood movie. Not only that, but many of Korea’s top actors play the character when he lives out the different lives of the people he has to die as. So you have 12 different actors playing the character at different times. I know that sounds weird and I wouldn’t have expected it to work, but somehow it does work. Even though you’re seeing different actors play this character, you always feel like you are, in fact, watching the same character. I’ve seen a few movies where they had different actors or actresses play the same character and it just didn’t work well at all. But this totally works.
This one easily gets an A+. And it’s definitely one of those Korean series that you do not have to be a Kdrama fanatic to appreciate. It’s much more of a suspense thriller than a drama.
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