Veteran South Korean actor Kim Yoon-seok plays a man who grows increasingly restless and paranoid in suspense thriller The Frog. The Frog Netflix ★★★★☆ In a bucolic South Korean countryside vacation town, the summer days are filled with sunlight, pool time and nature. But underneath the idyll, an unsolved murder and a disappearance haunt its residents.
Suspense crime thriller The Frog weaves both incidents together despite being 20 years apart. One is a crime from 2001: a serial killer brutally murders and dismembers a woman in Lakeview Motel, ruining the motel’s reputation and the lives of its owner Koo Sang-jun (Yoon Kye-sang), his wife Seo Eun-gyeong (Ryu Hyun-kyung) and their son Koo Gi-ho (played by K-pop boy band Exo’s Chanyeol as an adult). The other is in the present day: a mysterious woman Yoo Seong-a (Go Min-si) checks into a vacation rental run by Jeon Yeong-ha (Kim Yoon-seok) with her young son, but when she departs, the boy is nowhere to be found.
Both crimes are tied together by police officer Yoon Bo-min (Lee Jung-eun), who finds herself back at the lakeside town once more, two decades later. While it starts slow, the eight-part series on Netflix picks up pace midway through. Here are three reasons to tune in.
1. Refreshing point of view Stories about crimes tend to focus on the perpetrators, victims or the police, but The Frog takes on a fresh perspective by approaching it from the point of view of innocent bystanders who become collateral damage.