Watch it or Not ?
Opening Shot: A thunderstorm rages over a mountain. A small, dilapidated building has “Police Line: Do Not Cross” tape stretching around it. Inside a woman’s body is lying motionless.
The Gist: It’s not a dead body we see in the first shot of the series but the very much alive body of Lee Hong Jo (played by Cho Bo-Ah). Hong Jo is a low level civil servant for the city of Onju’s Green Space Division where she responds to the worst complaints the citizens have: she cleans dead fish out of the local ponds, she tries to calm angry residents with noise complaints. While responding to a noise complaint about a construction site working all night, she tries to calm the tension between the workers and their angry neighbors, when one of the men in the construction crew throws himself off the fourth floor and dies.
Six months later, we see a trial playing out and a young lawyer named Jang Sin Yu, played by K-Pop star Rowoon, is defending the construction company in a negligence lawsuit brought by the dead man’s wife. Sin Yu proves he’s clever and cunning, revealing in court that the dead man and his wife planned for him to get injured on the job to collect insurance, and things went awry during his fall. He and the rest of his legal team are ruthless, but his lack of emotion and empathy aren’t his worst trait: He’s plagued by a mysterious curse that manifests in different ways. He has body tremors. When he’s alone, a bloody red hand envelopes his face. It’s not really clear if this curse if truly evil or what, but it obviously haunts Sin Yu every day of his life.
So what brings these two very different people living in very different worlds together?
After a young man who was hiking dies at the site of a mysterious and reportedly haunted temple, Hong Jo goes to investigate the scene of his accident. While she’s there, she gets spooked when she thinks a statue is speaking to her, and she slips and falls, getting knocked out. Sin Yu also happened to be there checking in on it, as his wealthy family owns the shrine and the land it was built on. Eventually, the shrine has to be demolished, but while it’s being torn down, Sin Yu unearths a wooden box buried beneath it. A shaman, a woman who used to live in the temple on the land and obviously knows something about Sin Yu’s curse, tells him that his suffering will end now that he has met the owner of the wooden box. And guess who THAT is…
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