A couple committed suicide by swallowing medicine, but the husband woke up halfway and retrieved a life.
This 2022 South Korean 19 banned new drama is too explosive... Continuous updates...
This is the beginning of the Korean drama "The King of Pigs", with a Douban score of 8.4 points, which is quite good for the thriller genre.
But no matter how you look at it, this is not a complicated case, it is nothing more than a deliberate murder by the man, and then disguised as a suicide scene.
Sure enough, he was already half a suspect, and he still hit-and-run, disappeared, and confirmed the crime himself.
Subsequently, in the process of handling the case by the police, it was found that the man had suffered from domestic violence and school violence and suffered from depression when he was a child.
Okay, another person who interprets the motive for killing as a traumatic sequelae, and then criticizes the old routine of social reality.
In the first two short episodes, the writers also put everything on the table.
But in the almost natural case, there is always something wrong.
For example, if he had disguised the murder as suicide, why did he leave a blood book on the window to the police?
More paradoxically, surveillance showed that the dead wife had personally purchased a large amount of charcoal.
In other words, it is very likely that they really intend to commit suicide together, so why should the innocent husband run away?
Obviously, the opening case is just a small dish, compared to making the audience indulge in reasoning, when a clever rationalist.
The play seems to focus on the male protagonist, making people try to understand the logic of such a typical violent survivor, which should be similar but strange.
Speaking of such a creative intention, we have to mention the biggest highlight of this drama, which is adapted from the 2011 animated film of the same name - "King of pigs", just to say that this name may not be familiar to everyone.
It is the debut of "Busan Trip" director Yeon Sang-ho, this animation focusing on school violence is not long, but it is amazing, and even entered the Cannes Film Festival that year.
The rough drawing style coupled with the dark plot makes it have a rare evil, sharp, and of course not mainstream Korean animation.
Choosing to adapt such a 90-minute animation into a 12-episode TV series is definitely a rather bold and easy attempt to overturn.
In addition to the refined plot inevitably being diluted, the brutality of the original work is also likely to be greatly reduced by the live-action.
At present, it seems that the drama version of "The King of the Pig Plague" was first labeled with the label of "19 forbidden", and it was unambiguous in the sensory scale.
In terms of plot, the length of the animation obviously cannot support a TV series, so the drama version has added a lot of plot settings while clearly grasping its own positioning.
If you want to continue the amazement of animation, you must jump out of the stereotypical display of school violence.
In the original work, when the male protagonist was in middle school, the students were divided into several groups, and the minority "jackals" ran rampant everywhere, and most of the remaining people were "pigs".
The so-called "pig" is like a general term for all passive groups such as the rabble, the silent majority, the spectators, and so on.
It is also this symbol with a bit of derogatory meaning and self-deprecation that makes the discussion of "school violence" a springboard, leaving a specific framework and can parasitize, deform and expand like leeches in various systems.
Viewers who have watched the original animation will find that the focus of bullying in the film is not the unilateral violent crushing of the strong against the weak, but the formation of the structure of "Jackal Dog" and "Pig Monkey".
In front of it, the name "King of pigs" is ironic just to hear, even if it is called king, is it not still a pig in essence?
Don't pigs want to be jackals?
And when they move, won't they continue to follow this structure?
This is also the cruelty and sharpness of the original animation, which makes all the victims who survive as a good "pig" become impure to some extent.
And the seemingly low-level, simple school violence is not a special case, it has become a "real combat exercise" before we enter the society.
For TV series, whether they can adapt these contents has become the key, and judging from the first two episodes released, the drama version has done quite well.
First of all, a lot of changes were made to the plot, so that the two male protagonists who were once friends in the same window became the antagonistic relationship between fugitives and policemen.
The husband in the suicide case of the opening couple is Huang Jingmin, the male protagonist who was bullied in junior high school.
At the scene of the crime, he left a few lines of horrific blood books on the window, which directly led to another male protagonist, policeman Zheng Zongshuo.
In junior high school, the two were clearly inseparable bamboo horses, and the latter was Huang Jingmin's only hope for surviving a dark life.
But from the death party to the severance of diplomatic relations for a full 20 years, and then to the opening blood book roll call, such a thrilling relationship, from the beginning to leave us with a suspense.
In addition to these plot increases, the best and most effective place for the drama version to be done after the live-action is the performance of school violence.
From the first perspective of the adult Huang Jingmin, the picture plunges into the bullying scene in an immersive way.
And whenever the camera pans back to the present, it will be like a suffocating drowning person, who can finally surface to breathe heavily, making people's backs chill.
If you are not a person who has personally experienced the violence on campus, it is difficult to understand the sense of destruction, but each of us has been a bystander from far or near.
From the outside, school bullying can be easily reduced to violence with big bullying and small bullying, which seems to be very easy to solve, and the consequences are nothing more than some temporary trauma.
But in Huang Jingmin's immersive memories, school bullying has also become three-dimensional.
As an adult, he has a happy family and a successful career, and is a gentle and good gentleman. But the big man of one meter and eighty meters collapsed in an instant after accidentally glancing at his junior high school graduation photos.
The photo is obviously a group of hairy boys, saying that the good point is that they are green teenagers, everyone hooks up on their backs, looks healthy and healthy, and scatters the sky.
But these smiles look at it for a while, and then they tilt their mouths and eyes, and through twenty years of time, they completely beat a successful person in the social sense to the ground.
From his memories, school violence was a full-scale massacre, and now he is only a survivor after the massacre.
The first thing to bully is, of course, the flesh: being beaten at any time like a sandbag by the bosses, and the blue nose and swollen face are commonplace.
After the flesh, there is behavioral training—the leaders' various commands, such as being on call, slapping themselves, crawling in the classroom, having to laugh and talk back, and so on, until they gradually become reflexes.
What follows is the collapse of the spiritual defense line, the trampling of the dignity of being born as a human being.
Take Huang Jingmin in the play, for example, what he has in mind is the first time he is asked to masturbate in public in the toilet.
Even as an adult, he will still hallucinate in the public toilet, look at himself in that time and space, but desperately find that no one can help anyone.
But none of the above is the most cruel place to bully.
After all, physical suffering can be cured, spiritual defenses can be rebuilt, but it is difficult to make up for the premature loss of hope in life.
Huang Jingmin, who has just entered junior high school, keeps saying "endure another year, endure another year" to encourage himself, but the whole school is like a big net, and it is meaningless to declare a sentence in advance.
For students, the campus is the first collective that individuals encounter, and the first real sense of the outside world.
So what a bullying victim sees is not just the violence of one person or the indifference of a group of people, but the oppression of a whole world order, and there is no opportunity to call for help.
In the play, huang Jingmin as a child was often ordered to climb back to his seat as fast as he could, and he would always walk through half the classroom and first look up to see his good friend Zheng Zongshuo staying motionless in his seat.
Then he looked at the layers of faces above, all of them were his own good classmates, and it was clear that he was not the one who had abused him, but anyone could add a kick and participate in this anonymous event.
Of course, this way of expression is also easy to make Huang Jingmin a pure victim.
He is not like the male protagonist in the animation, who seems to be a poor person, but in essence, he is cowardly and suppresses evil, and has nowhere to vent but to swing his knife at the weaker.
The two male protagonists of the drama version, Zheng Zongshuo and Huang Jingmin, are all trying to live hard and try to escape the shadow of the past. One became a competent criminal policeman, and the other became a representative of a transport company.
Even in terms of personality, Huang Jingmin is also a gentle husband, with a harmonious relationship with his wife, regularly receiving psychological treatment, and maintaining emotional stability.
In this way, the drama version seems to weaken the original work's exposure to human nature, allowing them to escape the shadow of bullying as victims.
But in fact, the story has set a trap in the narrative from the beginning, and when we experience bullying with Huang Jingmin in the first perspective, we naturally empathize with his murderer's feelings.
So in the second episode, when he slashes at the enemy with his sword, you will only feel extremely happy, and you will be eager to have more knives.
But a closer look reveals that Huang Jingmin is a rather contradictory image, just like the strange blood book he left at the scene of the crime at the beginning.
In fact, whether his wife's death was related to him or not, it was like a shark who couldn't help but kill after seeing blood.
And his psychotherapy is not so much about healing the shadows as it is about adjusting his dark side.
Bullying brought him not only trauma, but also the replication and disguised inheritance of violence.
The first two episodes alone have given a lot of clues, such as when the father of the family violence was dying, Huang Jingmin broke up everyone, showing a fierce face of excitement, while saying "You are finally dead", while pulling off the ventilator.
Including the real first murder scene at the end of the second episode, the success of revenge alone is no longer enough, and the body is hung in the foyer like a sacrifice by him.
But because of the previous immersive display of school violence, it is easy for us to tolerate his strangeness.
But in fact, with a little attention, you will find that from the moment you see the graduation photo, Huang Jingmin's face often splits into a pair of mirror images.
He is not only a successful person in reality, Mr. Good, but also often sees a king of swine fever in a hoodie, always reminding himself of the essence of "pig".
In this sense, the play actually chose another path to explore the human proposition in the original work, two male protagonists, one with an irrepressible violent factor, and one who does not mention the past.
None of them point to a bright future, much less overcome the shadows of the past.
Just for the first two episodes, the adaptation of "King of the Plagues" is not too inferior compared to the original in scale and depth. As the plot develops, the memories of school violence begin to extend to reality and become more intriguing.
After Huang Jingmin became the representative of the company, the classmates who used to bully him became subordinates and bowed their knees all the time.
As a result, the pig turned over and became a jackal, and the original face of the jackal was actually a pig.
This is what this drama really needs to expand, whether it is school or society, it is a similar logic of watching people get off the plate, and once people intend to become kings, they become animals.
Having said all that, if the next plot can jump out of the framework of campus violence, then it will definitely be a masterpiece.