In the Forest With No One (2024)

If you fall asleep while watching the drama, and no eyes are opened to see it, is the drama good?

We get it, Na Hong Jin's The Wailing (2016) is great! But that does not mean replicating its structure will yield the same results. Similar to that of the infamous double ritual scene in The Wailing, The Frog films two events occuring in separate timelines simultaneously, and uses editing to try to trick viewers from interpreting what is happening in the story. It is only until much later into the episode where the disjointed timeline is revealed and attentive viewers begin to get an idea of what had happened. However, unlike The Wailing whose tricky editing served a thematic purpose, The Frog presents no reasoning for its editing choice except to test the viewer's patience. Also coincidentally, both productions happen to tackle the problem of random evil. But the stark contrast of how the subject matter was handled between the two is clear once again. While The Wailing ventures on an ambitious aim of understanding the why, utilizing the director's personal wrestlings of his faith as a keystone for shaping the plot, The Frog gives a muted showcasing of the damages done by evil without much reflection except to maybe criticize a lack of empathy for strangers. The execution between the two is akin to a gymnast gracefully landing a complex somersault and a frog leaping and falling flat on its belly. The Frog's performance is not the prettiest nor very thoughtful, but at least there was an attempt.

The series traces the timelines of two different lodging owners, Sang Jun, a motel owner, and Young Ha, a guest house owner. Both are victims of collateral damage by problematic renters, Hyang Cheol, a serial killer, and Seong Ah, a murderous squatter. Their narratives unfold nonlinearly, twenty years apart. In Sang Jun's case, a serial killer dismembers a body, for unknown reasons, in one of the rooms with a lake side view, which drives away business once the incident garners media attention. After a year, the motel owner goes bankrupt and is left with a broken family. Twenty years later in another remote corner of the same town, Young Ha deduces a woman has killed her stepson in the guest house. But to preserve the sanctity of his wife's final resting place and to avoid trouble involving a stranger, the pension house owner buries the truth. A year later, the same woman returns and tries to purchase the house.

Swarms of flashing lights and camera lens fill the air as media teams bombard a motel. We are at Lake Side View motel where Sang Jun frantically arrives to the scene oblivious of what has happened. A detective at the scene briefs him that one of his tenants is serial killer Ji Hyang Cheol, and the killer had dismembered a woman in one of the rooms. The devestated and terrified owner makes his way to the second floor room and uncovers the grisly truth. As if the traumatic event wasn't enough, Sang Jun soon realizes the greatest threat of Lake Side View motel that day wasn't the serial killer who was swiftly captured by police, but the hounding news anchors and reporters that covered the story without consideration for his circumstances.

For casual viewers, the scene of a media storm is not unordinary, but those who kept up with Korean entertainment news can link the event with the suicide of Lee Sun Kyun, a popular actor known for his unique voice. The coverage of his scandal was widespread and nonstop. Naturally, the climate was ripe for various rumors and unsupported allegations to spread among laypeople and professionals alike. It was only after his death when many people began to find the police, which leaked information, and the media, which relied less on the quality of the information but the quantity and quickness of their coverage, culpable. So, it should not color anyone surprised that a Netflix series attempts to capitalize on an infamous tragedy to function as a social commentary in the most careless and caricature-like manner, not even a year after his passing.

There is another frantic owner. But Young Ha has a good idea of what transpired inside the guest house and has the opportunity to correct an evil. He chooses not to. Instead, the bloodied crime scene with a corpse of a child is washed by his sweat, as the pension house owner ensures if Seong Ah, who casually cleaned the room in a hurry, left any lingering evidence, then he'll be the one to thoroughly erase it. Yet, similar to the reporters who had forgetten about and ignored Sang Jun's circumstances when covering his story, the writer ironically also forgets about Young Ha's situation while rushing to the next part of the story.

The Frog lazily puts both business owners, Young Ha and Sang Jun, adjacently together and parallel their misfortunes as one of the same. Yet, with a moment of reflection, it should be clear the pension owner's justification for not reporting the crime becomes flimsy when we consider:
I. Young Ha, whose daughter and son-in-law are willing to set up the house as a vacation house instead, is wealthy; Sang Jun invested his last cent into buying the motel and was penniless.
II. Seong Ah takes the corpse with her and cleans the crime scene; Hyang Cheol did not and left the dismembered body parts on the motel bedroom.

Any notions of an intrusive media or crime scene investigation team that affected the motel owner and his motel would not apply to the pension house. If Young Ha immediately reported the incident, most of the manpower would have been spent chasing Seong Ah down. A few forensics people may double check the guest house to see if there are any lingering evidence left, but they will not flip the whole place upside down as they did for the motel. In the absolute worst case scenario where information is leaked to the media, Young Ha can simply turn his pension house into a vacation home. Then, maybe the justitication for Young Ha's noninterference really boils down to a selfish businessman who did not want to involve his hands in the "meager death" of a stranger's child after all.

In a distant morning, Young Ha prepares the guest house rooms and the dinner ingredients for a scheduled family gathering. Out of the blue, Seong Ah returns in such a perfectly cliché fashion that calling it "cliché" wouldn't do it justice. After all, what kind of series sets up an entire episode for a cliché? The Frog did. Instead of creating a normal person who either keeps incriminating evidence for safe measure or discards them entirely to avoid trouble for possessing something he shouldn't, the brilliant writer opts for Young Ha to keep half-incriminating evidence. That is, he keeps the dashcam footage history, which means he'll be jeopardizing his life by holding onto the evidence, but he cleans the bloodied record, which was the other half of the evidence necessary to bring about reasonable suspicion. However, the nonsensical decision-making was perfectly orchestrated as it is crucial in enabling Young Ha to be stuck with Seong Ah. This is because if Young Ha possessed both pieces of evidence, a quick sucker punch to Seong Ah's face upon her unwelcomed appearance, would be the impetus to stun, restrain, and call the cops on her. In his current state, the pension house owner cannot do that because the recording, by itself, is insufficient evidence. Instead, he and Seong Ah must now apparently live together.

But, the whole purpose for a half-incriminating evidence, rather than no evidence at all, is to prepare ANOTHER cliché that occurs when our soft-hearted, child-murder witness has change of heart. Similar to married couples past their honeymoon phase, Young Ha cannot fathom living beside his newly acquired neighbor, which probably has something to do with her stuffing a dismembered child into a suitcase. However, Young Ha currently only has half the evidence for reasonable suspicion since he discarded the other half, so how can he compile enough evidence that goes beyond a reasonable doubt? A voice recorder will do! Now after he records Seong Ah's confession, he can simply drive off into the sunset as he presents the police his undeniable evidence. Nope. In predictable fashion, not only does the psycho woman conveniently spot the recorder box, she finds Young Ha right as he pulls up to the police station, floors the gas pedal and T-bone collides the poor man's car in broad daylight for every eyewitness to see. Is this disappointing or actually impressive stuff? We're talking linking clichés due to a single action the character made. Talk about making the most of something, even if none of the characters make sensible decisions.

That question is quickly put to rest in the following scene. We see a bloodied Young Ha in a wrecked car and Seong Ha with a mean glare casually approaching him. His car is bellowing with smoke while he is losing consciousness. Cops are running over to rescue the owner. Everyone saw what had happened. So, all the cops need to do is place Seong Ah under arrest for attempted murder, or at least, reckless endangerment, right? Just as viewers eagerly await for Justice to be served on an ice-cold platter, the writer jumps out of the screen and whispers into our ears, "Did anyone ACTUALLY see what happened?" And just like that, the attempted murder becomes nothing but wistful, evaporating memories. When viewers awake from their hypnotic slumber, like Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, we are convinced the accident never existed. Young Ha and Seong Ah also go back to being neighborly housemates. Then, some time later, a douchebag cop loverboy appears. He dies. Once again, no one gives a hoot about his going missing until his body is found after the entire ordeal is over. I guess people's lack of consideration for his disappearance is once again chalked up to "he was on vacation."

Finally, the two timelines converge into one, but the timelines are not the only thing that changes. There is an abrupt and drastic tonal shift where the series morphs into some Jason Bourne meets Terminator action flick, losing all the artificial tension that the first half laboriously spent attempting to build up. Instead, that tension is quickly replaced with more clichés, logical gaps, and half-assed writing:
A man carries a rifle into a hosptial filled with people, shoots another man, leaps out of the window of the several story building suffering from minor injury, and limps away. Authority figures practically do not exist and wend along the sidelines unless we conveniently need them to clean up the messy story at the end (or to resummarize the drama). Safety concerns? What are those? The characters line up in a single line like sheeps to a slaughterhouse to directly confront a madwoman. But actually, it turns out Seong Ah is physically weak! Oh wait, but it also turns out the other characters lack brain cells! A car comes crashing through the side of art gallery leading to massive destruction of property and endangerment of people's lives? No problem, money will resolve that. Because we all know rich people are above the law and escape their openly criminal behavior.

After going through various cumbersome shenanigans, it is time for The Frog to come to a close and unveil the truth. We face both killers separately: Hyang Cheol in his visiting cell; Seong Ah at gun point by her ex-husband who is justifiably pissed that his child got murdered by the psychotic stepmom. And when both killers are supposed to explain the BIG why: Why did we have to sit through those mindless and droning action sequences? Why did either killers carelessly go to vacation houses to perform their deed instead of, you know, just doing normal serial killer business, such as kidnapping hitchhikers at night, burying their body in an obscure location, and avoiding eyewitnesses? Since even riding a big white van that reads "I'm not a creep" while offering spiked candy to men, women, and children alike would have probably been a better methodology of remaining uncaught than what had actually transpired in the rental rooms. So, what started all this nonsense? Both their responses were essentially, "Meh, because I felt like it in the heat of the moment."

What the fu--

Ribbit... Ribbit... Ribbit...

Then, the brilliance of the writer hits us like the rays of Heaven:

A FROG DIES FROM A STONE THROWN INADVERTENTLY

The mumbo jumbo yapanese by the killers is to connect it to the frog idiom: the killers are the stone tossers randomly chucking their rocks; the business owners are the poor frogs! They say.
Of course, it all makes sense; duh, it was all because of the frogs; this writer is a genius! They say.

If there is one thing The Frog succeed in, it is the prototypical example of consumerist culture gone haywire. The art of screenplay and directing has become formulaic cookie-cutters, a pastiche of previous hits but devoid of an authentic voice or identity, relying on subterfuge and dynamic action sequences to compensate for its lack of depth and creativity. Any semblance of a "voice" is to pitch a tame, yet spineless position that matches the zeitgeist. The ultra-rich are evil! Everyone in Korea was unilaterally outraged by media encroachment, so I should write about that in a comically obvious way! But I should also add some conventional wisdom such as a frog idiom to give the series some narrative depth! In the mean time, the characters can forcefully draw out the connection with their awkward dialogue...

The Frog is symbolic. It is a frog inflating its throat, a generic, empty piece of entertainment with captivating images, that tries to croak deeper than its previous, but is caught unawares when people eventually find it annoying. If anything, The Frog represents enough time has passed for commodified art forms to have become commonplace and consumers no longer seek authentic, well crafted stories as long as they receive their dopamine kick. With its positive reception marks another sad victory for the mega-factory churning, AI generated future that algorithmically deconstruct and reconstruct human effort instantaneously for quick consumption: a superficial and soulless tomorrow.

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