Rating: 5 out of 5 Nose Bleeds
The one with half a head will hear you. The eyeball will squeeze you like a python. The one with the tongue will drain you dry. And you don’t want to mess with the big guy. Your best chance? The “special infectee.” But can you trust him?
Sweet Home starts like a basic zombie-apocalypse show; the world ends and a group of people barricade themselves inside a crumbling apartment building with a ground-floor shopping center while trying to survive and figure out what’s going on. But instead of zombies, it’s monsters.
And monsters are inherently more interesting. Zombies are all the same raggedy, growling drunks, but each creature in Sweet Home is unique, and oh so cool. They’re funny, gross, scary, impressive, and just downright effective. The stop motion look to some of them hooked me right away. I’ve always found stop motion unsettling. Wallace and Gromit? Terrifying.
All of the makeup and special effects are excellent, and it’s gory throughout. The first symptom of monsterization is a nose bleed, and this is no mere trickle. Such a simple thing, and yet so disturbing. If you suffer from epistaxiphobia, do not watch this show.
The human beings in Sweet Home are even better than the monsters. It’s a big, beautiful ensemble cast, a really fantastic collection of weirdos. The kids are great, the young adults are great, but I have a real soft spot for these older actors. They are PROS. Shoutout to Kim Hyun who is the heart and soul of the whole thing. Entire episodes pass with no monsters at all and they are some of the best, that’s how compelling these people are. The show creators gave them a crazy world to work in and they make it livable. They make it home.
All the credit to directors Young-woo Jang and Eung-bok Lee for pulling this thing together, lots of threads to hold on to and they do it nimbly. In ten episodes I can only think of one or two times the logic broke down. The explanation for why people are turning into monsters is weird and doesn’t play a big part – people are turning into monsters just deal with it – and there’s a concept called the “golden hour” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but the great thing about watching a show from a different country is you can just chalk it up to culture. Huh, I guess that’s how they would do it there, interesting.
I love Sweet Home. Watch it right away. It is 10 episodes of fun, available on Netflix. If you’re already a fan of Korean horror classics like The Host and Train to Busan, you will love this. If you are new to Korean horror, this is a great place to start. It’s a graveyard smash.
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