Cold-blooded murder, a mysterious femme-fatale and a man desperate to protect his way of life – what’s not to love? At one point in The Frog , defeated and despairing motel owner Gu Sang-jun (Yoon Kye-sang) tells the newly minted police officer Yoon Bo-min (Ha Yoon-kyung and Lee Jung-eun) to never be the “frog”. He compares the frog to an innocent bystander who gets hit by a stone. As it bleeds out by a cruel design of fate, the frog wonders who threw the stone and why it had to hit him.
“Why me?” is a question that comes up often in the K-drama – at its core, The Frog is a story mired in helplessness, told through the perspectives of unsuspecting, ordinary people who meet evil by happenstance and find their lives cruelly upended. READ MORE: 10 best historical K-dramas to watch on Netflix, Apple TV+ and more Two stories run parallel in Netflix’s latest K-drama offering, both focusing on the trickle-down impact of two motel owners meeting two serial killers. In 2001, well-meaning Gu Sang-jun insists that a mysterious man spend the night in his motel, only to discover that the man is a serial killer.
In 2021, a middle-aged Jeon Yeong-ha (Kim Yoon-seok) welcomes a woman and a child into his vacation rental but wakes up the next day to find her gone, eventually deducing that she’d murdered the child in his home. The ripple effect of the killers’ horrific actions impacts both these “frogs” in their own way. Sang-jun’s life (and motel) falls apart in excru.