For this week’s K-Drama Review, I really wanted to talk about ‘Save Me’. The drama came out in 2017 and was developed by Studio Dragon for OCN. I’ve never been let down by a Studio Dragon production so fingers crossed that I didn’t just jinx myself.
‘Save Me’ is a series about a cult and the town Muji-gun. It was based on a popular Daum webtoon ‘Out Of The World’ which you can find here. It’s in Korean though, I haven’t been able to find an English translation of it.
The Plot
The Im family moves from Seoul to Muji-gun after the father Im Joo-Ho, played by the ever formidable Jung Hae-Kyun loses his business. Im Sang-mi, the female lead and her brother Sang-Jin are trying to stay positive, but bullies see an easy victim in Sang-Jin.
In the meanwhile, the cult leader of Goseonwon and the two main apostles have their eyes set on the family becoming new members. They offer helping hands, give them a house, etc. All to lure them into the church. The leader, Baek Jung-Ki is especially interested in Sang-mi.
Then there are also four boys, the best of friends, who seem a bit goofy at first, but they’re good guys. They try to help Sang-mi and Sang-jin out at school. They’re fighters, so many punches are thrown throughout the entire series.
Each of the boys has a very different home situation and we get to learn their stories as well, as they’re pivotal to the story.
‘Save Me’ is so well written that I was bawling my eyes out in episode two, I was cheering along with the boys and Sang-mi, I was shouting in disbelief,… This show was incredible. Though I wouldn’t exactly call it an easy-watch.
The interesting way of the universe was that the day before I started watching ‘Save Me’, I watched this video of The Insider where someone who escaped from a cult rates scenes from movies that talk about the subject. It definitely gave an added value, because in the first couple of episodes I was seeing what he mentioned in the video in regards to the manipulation.
Acting chops
There are some major shout-outs I want to do because of the stellar performances in ‘Save Me’.
Seo Ye-Ji as Sang-mi did an excellent job. There was a fragility to her strength as a character. I felt like that brought a lot of depth. Also that must have been a really hard role to do. She apparently had nightmares throughout the four months of filming.
Yun Yoo-Sun played the mother of Sang-mi and Sang-jin. I can’t go into detail about her performance too much without giving away major spoilers, so let me just say this, she is fantastic and I believed every second of it.
The last actor I want to put in the spotlight is Park Ji-Young who plays Apostle Kang. She plays the complicated, layered character so well, I was hating her and pitying her at the same time.
Now before sharing the trailer, I do want to give some trigger warnings, because there are some dark topics in the K-Drama ‘Save Me’. So if you’re uncomfortable with the topics of rape, mental illness and religious cults, then please steer clear.
Nitpicking
There are two things that irked me though. The first thing is the subtitles of Netflix. They were legit horrible. I read so many spelling and grammatical mistakes that sometimes it took me out of the world building. If you have the cult’s name, please stick to one spelling. I read Goseonwon, Guseonwon, Gooseonwoon. Also it’s kind of a key thing to have your female lead’s name correctly spelled. It’s not Sang-ma, it is Sang-mi. At one point there was even a scene without subtitles, so I just had to understand through context what the character more or less was saying.
The second thing on a story level that didn’t really seem that believable was the fact that the four boys only knew Sang-mi and her brother for maybe a couple of days before everything happened but they risked their lives multiple times to try and help save her. I’m just putting it out there, maybe it was different in the Webtoon so it made more sense.
If you would like to watch the trailer, you can find that below. And as mentioned, the K-drama ‘Save Me’ is available on Netflix. There is also a second season that was released in 2019, but I haven’t watched that yet so I can’t share my opinion on that one.
