HELLBOUND Season One
Bad tidings of a great void
UK/US Netflix, streaming now
Showrunner Sang-ho Yeon
Cast Yoo Ah-in, Ik-joon Yang,
Kim Hyun-joo, Shin-rok Kim
You’ve never seen angels like these before. In this mini-series by Train To Busan director Sang-ho Yeon, you can forget visions with wings and halos: these angels are beefy Hulk-alikes trailing fire and brimstone, prone to beating the living daylights out of their victims before dragging them to hell. When footage of one such dragging on a busy Seoul street is posted online, people freak out; as the angelic attacks ramp up, so does the panic level.
From a post-covid perspective, the initial response to the horror seems almost a little muted. But then a messiah figure emerges: Jeong Jin-soo (Yoo Ah-in), a quiet young man with a pop star’s haircut, promises to make sense of the chaos. According to him, it’s all God’s punishment for people’s sins. It doesn’t take long before he’s got a whole army of devoted followers, willing to do anything to prove their loyalty…
The first couple of episodes are a little overwhelming, as the show sets up both its outlandish premise and its jumble of characters. Messy deaths break up dialogueheavy scenes of people discussing deep ontological questions, and it’s all pretty intense. The second half of the season gets deeper into the New Truth cult’s motivations and raises the emotional stakes, with episode five in particular posing truly tricky moral dilemmas.
But six episodes seems both too long and too short for this story; it could’ve been a cracking 90-minute horror movie, or a more measured 10-episode series, while six hours (with a cliffhanger ending) just feels frustrating. Still, those angels, eh?
The series is based on Yeon Sang-ho’s web comic. An English-translation graphic novel is out now from Dark Horse.
The second half of the season gets deeper into the New Truth cult’s motivations