Actor Go Min-si plays Yoo Sung-a in Netflix drama, "The Frog." Courtesy of Netflix

I wanted to like "The Frog." I really did. And, after three episodes, I had great hope for what was unfolding. I was struggling to keep up with the non-chronological narration. I was fascinated by the occasional glimpses of the unconscious. And I was in love with Go Min-si’s character: a femme fatale shrouded in mystery and oozing sex appeal. I spoke of my predictions to the people around me. “I think it might be their grief playing out” or, “It might be like Lost and the hotel is a form of purgatory or something.”

You also slowly realize that there are two timelines playing out simultaneously. My wife clocked this earlier than me when she walked into the room and noticed the colors of the police officers’ uniforms. “Wow. This must be an old drama because those uniforms are a different color.” But then these timelines are not etched together well. You don’t get a sense of casual interaction between past and future. You don’t feel like they bring you to a greater understanding of the whole. Compare this to something like the excellent German drama “Dark” where things go backwards and forwards excellently.

“The Frog” invites supposition and encourages all sorts of hypothesis and theories. It plays with ambiguity, teasing the viewer. Promising to unfold a story that we are perhaps not quite ready for. But by episode seven, I was done with it. Just wanting it to reach its bland and unfulfilling resolution. Eventually, nothing interesting came to pass and you are left with banality and cliche. The one advantage “The Frog” has over things like “Lost” or “Games of Thrones” is that while those things took years and countless hours of watching to disappoint, at only eight episodes, this can satiate your disappointment quickly.

It felt like “The Frog” wanted to be “The Shining.” It simply didn’t have the courage or the ability to do so. They nearly even repeated the iconic scene with an axe coming through a door in one of the final episodes but obviously realized that would have been too much for people to stomach. Kubrick’s masterpiece........

© The Korea Times