K-drama Dark Hole: Horror survival series digs itself into messy quagmire

This article contains spoilers.

We were unceremoniously deprived of most of a not-quite-zombie horror drama when Joseon Exorcist was axed earlier this year, but that itch is ready to be scratched again with Dark Hole, a new 12-episode horror drama from OCN that has concocted its own breed of zombie-like creatures.

Dark Hole takes place in a country town called Muji. Kim Ok-vin, known for Park Chan-wook’s twisted vampire fable Thirst and the action flick The Villainess, stars as Lee Hwa-sun, a surly Seoul detective who winds up in Muji in search of a serial killer. She arrives just as a mysterious smoke spills down from the forest and begins turning people into violent monsters.

The source of the smoke is a large and deep hole up in the forest and within the smoke is a kind of black dust that slaloms through the air in search of prey. Once it finds a host, the dust enters through an orifice and takes over. The victim’s eyes go black and they start to imagine everyone around them is the darkest figure of their past, one that they become hell-bent on killing.

Series co-lead Lee Joon-hyuk, known as one of the villains in the hit show Stranger, plays Yoo Tae-han, a disgraced former cop (aren’t they always?). He now works as a gutsy tow truck driver and early on saves a woman from a car wreck moments before it explodes.

His partner Young-sik (Kim Han-jong) is one of the first victims of the mist and is brought to hospital, where Tae-han and Hwa-sun first meet. When Young-sik escapes, they go after him and find themselves at the precipice of the dark hole, where Hwa-sun is invaded by the black dust. Her eyes turn black and she turns her gun on Tae-han, before the calming voice of her dead husband brings her back to her senses.

Hwa-sun isn’t after just any serial killer – the criminal she’s tracking is a young woman who kills people by injecting them with a drug and then leaves a white cloth sack over their heads, each decorated with a smiling red face painted in lipstick. One of the killer’s recent victims was Hwa-sun’s own husband.

The smoke quickly spreads through Muji and death and pandemonium take over. Hwa-sun and Tae-han go their separate ways and soon become the leaders of different factions in the town as clumps of survivors wind up in the hospital and a high school, each with their own personal problems.

Hwa-sun, who winds up at the school, first saves a young girl and together they are saved by the members of New Saviour Church, which quickly turns out to be a suicide cult. Once they get to the school they encounter a full complement of new characters, including its corrupt and self-serving principal, his kindly teacher son, and several students, such as a strange young girl and a bully with a penchant for flashy clothes.

Meanwhile, Tae-han has his own group to deal with at the hospital, among them a competent doctor, a mysterious shaman who may know more about what’s going on than she lets on, a slimy loan shark, and a few local cops, one of whom with a pregnant wife who is about to pop and is in need of saving in a different part of the building.

We also get several glimpses of news reports about mysterious sun spots, and the series itself begins with a cold opening that takes place a few days in the future when Hwa-sun and Tae-han are battling with snake-like creatures in a factory.

Given all the elements at work, Dark Hole is clearly biting off far more than it can chew. To its credit, none of what has been presented in its first four episodes is hard to follow, but with so much going on it’s all but impossible to get attached to any of these characters or invested in the plights they find themselves in.

The flash forward opening gives us a pretty clear indication of where things are heading and given the short series order and shorter-than-usual episodes (at 60 minutes each), it’s probably too much to hope for much in the way of satisfying character arcs.

So how does it work as a horror-action series? The trapped survivors versus monsters set-up was done recently in Sweet Home , a show with fewer characters, far less thematic ambition and a vastly higher budget. A third of the way through its run, Dark Hole compares rather poorly. The staging is competent but unimaginative, and the narrative is simplistic but all over the place.

Then there’s the horror concept itself, which has been pretty inconsistent. We’re supposed to believe that everyone has a trauma in their past capable of pushing them to murder. On top of that, we must accept that Hwa-sun is the only person who can forbear that impulse, due to the love of her husband.

In effect, the few established rules are immediately broken by an emotional deus ex machina. Given the strong possibility that the provenance of the mysterious mist is likely both supernatural and alien in origin, it may be a tall order for this show to dig itself out of its own dark hole.

Dark Hole is streaming on Viu.

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.