There are times when a thriller starts slowly, because it needs to set up who the main players are and what the case that’s being investigated is all about. A new Korean thriller streaming on Hulu not only has to do that, but it also has to set up a scenario that took place ten years before the main action occured.
Opening Shot: A teenager in a school uniform walks in the rain.
The Gist: Jo I-na (Kim Da-mi) goes to her uncle’s massive modern house and punches in the code to get in. As she walks into his living room, she steps on a puzzle piece that’s been left on the floor. After she picks it up, she sees a pool of blood. It ends up being her uncle, who has been murdered via an awl stuck in his neck.
When questioned by the police, especially a dogged detective named Kim Han-saem (Son Suk-ku), I-na doesn’t seem to recall what brought her to the house or how she got inside. However, the only fingerprints on the awl are hers. When he flat out asks her if she did it or not, she replies, “I really don’t know. Honestly.”
Ten years later, we see an adult version of I-na repeatedly bungee jumping off a bridge. She’s definitely a thrill-seeker, and when she talks with her therapist, we see that her uncle’s death has really affected her. She even still hangs onto the puzzle piece she found at the scene. It’s even affected her career: She’s now a profiler for the same police precinct that investigated her a decade prior.
Her uncle’s unsolved murder still rankles the department, because he had just retired as a police inspector right before he was killed. In fact, Han-saem is still actively investigating the case, and his obsession with the case is likely why he hasn’t been promoted.
In the meantime, I-na and the team she works with get a grisly murder case of a 10-year-old boy. The person who found him, the boy’s older brother, has no memory of what happened before he found himself with his brother’s bloody body. I-na starts to figure out that the case is eerily similar to what happened to her and her uncle ten years ago.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Nine Puzzles is a Korean crime thriller in the same vein as The Frog.
Our Take: The first episode of Nine Puzzles moves slowly, but it serves to set up how I-na and Han-saem are going to end up teaming up to find out who killed the boy, and given how the circumstances end up being strongly connected to the murder of I-na’s uncle, the hope is that I-na will finally be fully absolved of that killing.
Of course, there will likely be other murders — and puzzle pieces associated with them — in the meantime. The series feels like it will ratchet up the intensity as I-na and Han-saem get closer to a solution, with the killer taunting her with more puzzle pieces along the way.
At least that’s the hope. The first episode felt that it could have told its part of the story in about fifteen less minutes than what it took. When the story moves from the mostly repressing I-na to the brooding Han-saem, things slow to a crawl. What we want to know is how the last ten years have transpired, how I-na ended up with the police, and how the two of them begrudgingly work together, despite the fact that Han-saem has never given up on the idea that I-na killed her uncle.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: I-na receives a second puzzle piece in a package, indicating to her that whoever killed her uncle ten years ago has started things up again.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Hyun Bong-sik, who plays a “rookie” named Choi San. Why is he interesting? Because he looks older than all of the veteran detectives in his squad.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Nine Puzzles starts up slow, but sets up an intriguing thriller that we hope gets more intense as it goes along.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.