I was almost put off watching this by all the negative reviews but it had been on my watchlist for a while and I had been excited to watch it when I first heard about it so I decided to give it a go. I’m really glad I did!

There were lots of things I really liked about this show:

The acting was very good, casting was good and acting was believable. Only downside was the throwback scenes of Ri-an and Jae-I felt a little awkward to me (hence 9 not a 10)

They had a really cool use of shadows in certain scenes, especially in the first few episodes, which helped portray certain messages. For example, there is a scene where Ri-ans mum is talking to him and only he is in the shot with the shadow of her head, but the shadow of her is a lot larger than him proportionately so you can see how she holds herself above him.

The main 4 in the cool clique used each others full names a lot and their parents used their full names a lot of the time, but Kang Ha spoke more informally with their names which showed the status difference and the cold relationships they have.

There was a lot of misdirection so it wasn’t clear who was going to have killed the exchange student until nearer the end when it started becoming more obvious. The first few episodes also had a lot of misdirection around which secrets were getting out and who the blackmailer was which made it more fun.

All in all, I enjoyed the show and am glad I gave it a try!