Mask Girl: Episode 1 (First Impressions)

by mistyisles

A woman who is ridiculed for her looks makes a name for herself as a flashy masked internet personality — but what happens if her online persona gets shut down? Mask Girl promos promised murder and mayhem, but at least in this first episode, the twistedness lurks somewhere in the background, waiting for the right moment of vulnerability and desperation.

 
EPISODE 1

I went into Mask Girl bracing myself for twisted, graphic violence — but I’ll be honest, I found this first episode to be rather underwhelming. I could see hints of intrigue to come, and I’m definitely left with questions, but I also don’t feel all that compelled to continue. (Especially since, I’m told, Episode 2 delivers on that promise of gore.)

The story begins with a peek at the early life of our protagonist, KIM MOMI (played in this episode by the previously unnamed rookie actress Lee Han-byeol). Since childhood, all Momi has wanted to do is perform onstage and bask in the audience’s applause. As she grew up, however, her dreams were crushed because everyone including her own mother declared her too ugly to be a performer.

The rest of this episode takes place in 2009, when 27-year-old Momi works a boring office job by day and performs by night as “Mask Girl,” a popular, mask-wearing cam girl. Her livestreams are glitzy, sexy, and energetic. The rest of her daily life, in stark contrast, is very gray and unexciting — monotonous commutes, sexist co-workers, and constant reminders that Momi is not considered attractive.

The one bright spot in Momi’s unfulfilling day job is her boss, PARK KI-HOON (Daniel Choi). Unlike the other male superiors, Mr. Park doesn’t fawn over the beautiful LEE AH-REUM (Park Jung-hwa). No, he’s different, Momi sighs as she gazes at him over the top of her cubicle. She admires how hard he works… unaware that he’s busy photoshopping a six-pack onto himself. As far as Momi is concerned, though, Mr. Park is the perfect man. There’s just one problem: he’s married.

After a company dinner one night, Mr. Park decides to head out early, and Momi decides to seize her chance. If he’s heading in the direction of her subway station, they might as well share a taxi, right? Mr. Park agrees to give her a lift. Curiously, when his wife calls, he glances at Momi before lying that he’s alone.

That’s enough to send Momi into a frenzy of speculation. She giddily shares the story on her livestream and asks her fans’ opinions: could he be into her? She kicks out any commenters who shoot down her fantasy. But that’s exactly what it is, because the very next evening she returns to the office for her misplaced wallet, only to find Mr. Park and Ah-reum doing some very unprofessional activities in the back room.

Devastated, Momi goes home and gets very drunk — drunk enough to go live and perform a dance routine that ends with her stripping completely nude (except for her mask, of course). She’s promptly suspended from the streaming site, but people being people, the footage lives on in screenshots and video downloads.

The next morning, Momi is mortified by her own behavior. She decides it’s all Ah-reum’s fault, and in retaliation she spills the secret about Ah-reum and Mr. Park’s affair to her gossipy friends. She knows exactly what she’s doing, and yet she somehow still seems shocked when the rumor takes on a life of its own and both Ah-reum and Mr. Park are transferred out.

Perhaps she feels a twinge of guilt when she happens upon a very distraught (and also drunk) Mr. Park on the way home that night. So she helps him into a taxi, but because he’s too drunk to give her an exact address, she puts him up in a hotel room for the night. Except, she also joins him in the room. And undresses him. And climbs into bed with him. Whether she does anything more than that is left for us (and Mr. Park) to wonder, but he doesn’t stick around long enough the next morning to ask questions. And, regardless of what I may think about any of his other choices, I can’t blame him for that.

Then Momi’s world is rocked by a threatening message sent to her work email. It’s an explicit photo from her last Mask Girl stream captioned I know who you are. Her day just gets worse from there, as she’s groped on the subway. She drags the perpetrator to the police station, but they’re reluctant to do anything without evidence. Then she gets so worked up that she attacks the man, and the police wash their hands of it — as far as they’re concerned, she’s the one who committed assault.

Momi returns to her dark home and suspended Mask Girl channel. The only person she has to talk to is a fan who happens to be online, who assures her she’s gorgeous and shouldn’t give up on finding love. Then the episode ends by panning over to show us that the reassuring fan is actually a co-worker of hers, and he has a very creepy aura, to say the least.

I think the biggest barrier to enjoyment for me here is that there just isn’t anyone to root for. Momi gets a few sympathy points for being unfairly degraded, but she pretty much lost me when she took advantage of Mr. Park. Even if she didn’t do anything, it was creepy of her.

To reiterate what I said before, part of me is a little curious where Momi will go from here. I think it might be slightly more interesting character-wise if she’d intentionally sabotaged her own show with the nude livestream, instead of it being a drunken mistake. But at the same time, I feel like it should take a bit more than a shattered fantasy about her crush to drive her to destroy her only creative outlet. Either way, though, I expect she’ll go to even further lengths to get what she wants by the end of it all — I just don’t think I personally will be along for the ride.

 
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