Sweet Home 3 (2024) Ramblings

There’s chatter around the web about a phenomenon known as superhero fatigue at the box office. Certainly there’s no denying since the completion of Phase 3 of the MCU that the quality of superhero films has fallen short of its glory days a decade or so ago. At least that seems to be the general consensus. However I think the recent success of the Deadpool and Wolverine movie proves though that the so-called “fatigue” is most likely a reaction against bad superhero films or superhero stories told badly.

There’s little doubt that in the last five or six years, the South Korean entertainment industry has tapped into the superhero zeitgeist with shows like Kingdom, Uncanny Counter, Taxi Driver, Mystic Pop-up Bar and, of course, Sweet Home. (It is no accident that apart from Kingdom they’re all adaptations of manhwas) Therefore, it’s scarcely surprising then that many of the problems that characterize Hollywood sequels show up in South Korean drama sequels as well. This new (and perhaps dubious) trend to give sequels to hugely popular SK shows has seen wide ranging results.

The first installment of Sweet Home was a great show. Those well-acquainted with the manhwa may have had misgivings about the adaptation. But for someone like me, not at all a fan of the source material or horror, it’s become one of my favourite K dramas of all time. The first series was a tightly plotted show with great character arcs underpinned by an array of existential themes. The juggling act was a joy to behold while I watched aghast at the blood-letting that unfolded. There was enough blood splattered around in those 10 episodes to supply my local blood bank for months. I laughed and cried with the characters. Most of all, I wanted them to survive the monsterization holocaust to see another day. Some did. Some didn’t. That’s to be expected in a catastrophe of this magnitude. Those who died nobly would be remembered by those they left behind for their sacrifice and courage in the face of the unthinkable.

OG Sweet Home was a man-made disaster story that explored the best and the worst of humanity under fire. Parts 2 and 3 transitioned that story into a sci-fi, superhero narrative still trying to grapple with the same existential questions on a far larger scale. Governments are ill-equipped to deal with such a crisis. Law and order can barely hold it together. There’s no reason why that couldn’t have worked except for the introduction of many characters whose sole purpose is not to tell a story but to sell a message. Therein lies one of the major problems. There are multiple stories that don’t cohere seamlessly. Often the characters in the subplot are sharing that scenario with the familiar faces but not only do they seldom interact, they feel like they’re in an inferior spin-off that you don’t care much for.

Douyin short dramas have been instructive in the sense they’ve made it plainly obvious what a plot-driven propaganda imbued piece of trashy media looks like. Characters don’t matter much in plot-driven shows. The showrunners have a story to tell and they’re more than eager to turn their characters into lobotomized idiots and raving lunatics if that facilitates their brand of storytelling. While there’s some of that going on in Sweet Home 2 and 3, it’s not as blatant or egregious.

*** Beware of spoilers… ***

Scaling up seems inevitable after the end of OG Sweet Home. After all, it’s not just the people of the apartment building that’s been infected. The whole country is in chaos. The supply chains have been completely cut off so the survivors must seek shelter at a central location to escape the monsters and monsterization. The stadium is the location of choice and as usual the elites have a law for thee and not for me. Then there’s mad scientist Dr Lim (Oh Jung-se) who is messing around with the special infectees like Cha Hyun-su (Song Kang) who haven’t achieved full monsterization and are unlikely to do so. So the doctor wants to know why. He is his own kind of monster in a lab coat making unsavoury deals with whomever can get him out of one crisis after another.

At the start of Part 2, the country has been turned into a dystopian nightmare trying to “quarantine” the symptomatic from those in the clear. Everyone’s terrified of being infected lest they get ostracized and get “excommunicated” from whatever semblance of community is left. What is meant to be a place of refuge quickly becomes a kind of detention centre. Or the railway station before the pyre and/or the morgue.

So the show scales up. There’s more of everything — people, space, conflict, anguish and insanity. While that’s understandable, the show’s priorities are oddly misplaced. The least of objectionable part is this military presence in representing law and order but they go and spoil it all by having a head-scratching subplot of a team going off to rescue a comrade-in-arms behaving recklessly, leading to an unnecessary loss of life. To what end? I can only speculate that this has something to do with showcasing loyalty, courage and selflessness. All that can be done in other ways. Park Chan-yeong (Jung Jin-young) is a case in point. He epitomizes everything positive not only about the military but humanity in general. He does his job without batting an eyelash, saves lives and puts his life on the line. There are certainly tensions within the military about how to get the job done between Sergeant Kim and Master Sergeant Tak but they’re well-intentioned guys trying to make the best of an impossible situation for which everyone is unprepared for.

What there seems to be too much of is conflict. While people say and do silly things under duress, the refugees at the stadium seem to be struck with a terrible case of cabin fever. Sure, it’s meant to be a microcosm of the best and the worst of humanity, there seems to be more bad than good. Hot heads seem to prevail in most instances. Moreover, the show seems to be wanting to emulate the US tv show Lost with its scattered approach to creating mystery boxes without doing anything especially well.

In Part 1 Hyun-su is perceived by his neighbours to be a freakshow and an anomaly. He never goes full monster mode and it’s never entirely clear why at the time. It could be that even though he’s angry lad, his Bruce Banner never lets the Hulk “the other guy” take over. In parts 2 and 3, Hyun-su’s hybrid nature or his ability to turn his monster side off and on gradually transforms him into a superhero. He has a handy gift — the ability to enter the headspace of monsters and reverse the process of monsterization. From being a pariah, a superhero is born. Aside from pulling out the wing that kills, Cha Hyun-su becomes a healer of sorts as long as he can keep his dark side in check. It’s also left to him to rid the world of the sneaky Pyeong Sang-wook whoever he happens to be at the time.

Then there’s the other subplot with Seo Yi-kyung and her daughter — the girl who is the key to everything apparently. She’s the monster maker, conflicted over her identity as the child of her mother and father who further confuses the issue in the way he sets up some kind of host vessel for when his body finally falls apart.

The show is at its best when the focus is on what’s left of the original cast and a handful of those in the military. The ancillary characters who are more of a hindrance than a help, are fodder and scenery. The show relies heavily on them to set the stage for moral and ethical battles to be played out in gorish fashion. Civilization demands that they thrash it out. While their existence should be acknowledge, there’s really no need for them to take centre stage at any point. Few are interesting enough to deserve that amount of oxygen. Lee Eun-yu’s (Go Min-so) arc was baffling on some level. She spends most of the sequels whining about waiting for someone with a doggedness that borders on the irrational. Her mind is perpetually hankering for the good o’l days in the apartment she shared with stepbrother (Lee Do-hyun) and clamours to return there. Afterall he did promise to come for her. No doubt it’s the show’s way of going full circle — a clumsy reminder about where it all began serving as a tie-in to the title.

Much of the show’s problems stems from the need to feel weighty… and ponderous. (That or the showrunners are desperate to stretch this out to 16 episodes for reasons known only to themselves) It wants the audience to be informed in no uncertain terms that it has important things to say about the state of the world with competing claims from various interest groups. Except that it devolves in the end to a simplistic “let’s hold hands and sing kumbaya” resolution. Everyone wants to live peacefully and enjoy a piece of the pie. Is it possible that there’s a place for all kinds? Probably. But the show doesn’t tell us how and conveniently handwaves the uneasy truce with the promised construction of a new world order.

The lumbering nature of the show is also driven by the need to pontificate at the most inopportune moments. It does go some way in explaining the inexplicable subplots and the abrupt cuts as well as misplaced dialogue that serve no real purpose except to preach. Like the Gyeongseong Creature misfire, that kind of storytelling diminishes the urgency and even the stakes. The good guys and their antagonists stroll around the set pieces with all the time in the world. The arguments lose their force because the characters are far too busy consumed with petty concerns and backstabbing than trying to survive the apocalypse in any meaningful fashion.

Thematically the show does somewhat better. The characters who are essentially chess pieces in this show are often mouthpieces for what the showrunners want articulated. Sci-fi often tends to go that way although there are genuinely heartfelt moments in the Sweet Home franchise especially among the familiar faces. What’s particularly compelling here is that there’s truth and reality that transcends every individual. Without leadership, laws and community, individuals inevitably become tyrannical or lost. Human beings cannot live without boundaries or structures because at the core we are fallen creatures prone to disordering our loves. Without restraints, all roads lead to anarchy. The entity that possesses Pyeong Sang-uk is evil — a restless demonic evil that takes over the host using him/her to further its Luciferian agenda of propagating lies, striking terror and wreaking havoc among the survivors. It’s also evident from what goes on in and out of the stadium that humanity’s need to belong makes us vulnerable to exploitation by very bad actors.

Sweet Home is very much a Christian fairytale in the same vein as A Christmas Carol. Though fallen, humanity is made in the image of God and can be redeemed. Of course there are those who can’t/won’t be redeemed past a certain point when they’re given over completely to their distorted desires. With regards to Cha Hyun-su who finds his wings alluding to birds and angels, there was potential there to go much further than what they did with the character. Admittedly one of the highlights of the show is watching the development of Hyun-su as an angelic being — a messenger of God as well as a harbinger of death and life. (The tenth plague of Egypt springs to mind) Similarly Hans Christian Andersen’s ugly duckling Hyun-su, the boy who was once bullied and despised becomes a magnificent winged creature growing into the hero that everyone’s been waiting for.

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