Hellbound

HellboundHellbound starts with a smoke monster dragging people to hell, then ups the ante. Over the course of the new Netflix drama, creators Choi Gyu-seok and Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho push through plot lines and human body parts with the same devil-may-care attitude of the opening, balancing social commentary with the ever-mounting tension that comes with a world where you might be brutally sent to hell at the drop of a hat. Miraculously, Hellbound manages to pull it all off for the whole six-episode season.Hellbound Season 1 Download

The stakes are set by episode 1: As the clock strikes 1:20 p.m., an otherwise unassuming man fearfully is ruthlessly torn apart by demonic, ape-like monsters who leave only charred remains in their wake. From there, Hellbound moves methodically to interrogate the moment. Detective Jin Kyung-hoon (Yang Ik-june) is assigned to investigate the “murder,” as well as the New Truth, a YouTube-based religious sect claiming that the creatures are in fact angels acting on the divine will of God. In the eyes of New Truth chairman Jung Jin-soo (Burning’s Yoo Ah-in), these sinners got what was coming to them, and the rest of the world would be wise to wake up to God’s new strategy.Neither the chairman, nor the detective, nor even Min Hyejin (Kim Hyun-joo), a lawyer for the accused sinners, holds the show’s focus for long. Rather, Hellbound morphs from police procedural to social media outrage thinkpiece to religious soliloquy to Greek tragedy, narrowing the lens with each jump in order to tighten the screws of what living with such merciless judgment really means. That could leave the show feeling unfocused, but instead it just feels like intentional chaos, eschewing anything that would let the story be too neat. In the same vein as Akira, the narrative simply jumps between characters as they’re responding to the central events, providing whatever is the most interesting lens on the story at the time.