Hellbound landed on Netflix on November 19, 2021, two months after Squid Game, and became the world’s most-watched series on the service the next day. It could not escape the comparison, and it did not deserve it. Squid Game was about money. Hellbound, written and directed by Yeon Sang-ho with Choi Gyu-seok and based on their own webtoon, is about God, or the absence of one, and it is the stranger and more serious show.
Trailer, via Netflix.
The Decree
Set in what was then the near future of 2022, the series begins when supernatural beings appear out of nowhere and condemn people to Hell. A face materializes, announces a name and a time, and at the appointed moment monstrous creatures arrive to carry out the sentence in public. There is no explanation, and there is no appeal.
Out of that terror grows a religious movement built on the idea that these are acts of divine justice, that the condemned must have sinned, and that society should organize itself around the decrees. The show is less interested in the monsters than in the people who decide what the monsters mean.
The Cast
The ensemble is large. Yoo Ah-in plays the leader of the new faith with a stillness that is more frightening than any creature. Kim Hyun-joo plays Min Hye-jin, a lawyer who becomes the show’s conscience, and Kim Shin-rok’s Park Jung-ja is at the center of the season’s most harrowing sequence. Park Jeong-min, Won Jin-ah, Yang Ik-june, Ryu Kyung-soo and Kim Sung-cheol fill out a cast that never feels like a cast. Everyone is a citizen first.
The Argument
Hellbound is a thriller about how fast a society will trade freedom for the comfort of a rule. The religious group and its street enforcers are the real horror, and the show’s best scenes are the quiet ones where ordinary people decide to go along. Critics were positive and predicted it would be heavily discussed, and it was, because it was making an argument rather than staging a spectacle.
The Festival
The first season premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2021, the first Korean drama to make the festival’s television program. That is where it belonged. It is closer to a film in six parts than to a binge.
Where It Falls Short
It is cold. The show’s intelligence rarely warms into feeling, and the second half of the first season loses the momentum of the first by shifting to new characters and a slower register. The creature effects are inconsistent. And a second season, released in October 2024, had to reckon with a premise that was more powerful as a question than as a continuing story.
The Verdict
Hellbound is a smart, severe series that asks what people will do with a miracle they cannot understand. The answer it gives is not comforting, and that is why it is worth watching.
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