A Shop for Killers: Episode 1 (First Impressions)

by missvictrix

A Shop for Killers out-performed my expectations with its first episode. Instead of just being high-powered and violent, the drama is actually equal parts introspection and quiet suspense, too, making it far more interesting and thoughtful than it might have given itself credit for.

Editor’s note: This is an Episode 1 review only. For a place to chat about the entire drama, visit the Drama Hangout.

 
EPISODE 1

Our drama opens in a rural setting where a random house is under a serious siege. In addition to armed men approaching in the nearby field, there’s a scaryass sniper (Seo Hyun-woo) in a scaryass minivan that’s got his sights right on the living room. Inside said living room is a college-aged girl in a tracksuit. We come to learn later that she’s JUNG JI-AHN (Kim Hye-joon). The sniper has Ji-ahn pinned so she can’t move from where she’s hiding behind the fridge.

As we get the lay of the land, we see that there are more people in the house, also bloodied and hiding, and we’ll get to know them later — and how the scene unfolded. For now, what we get is the first of many flashbacks of our heroine with a memory of her uncle, JUNG JIN-MAN (Lee Dong-wook). The two of them are sitting on the couch watching a movie with some fancy bullet-dodging and Jin-man gives her a little lesson in perception and blind spots. Back in the living room, she puts it to good use, finding a blind spot in the sniper’s view and leaping (literally) to the other side of the room. Ji-ahn flips the couch and underneath is a stealthily stored sniper rifle and fresh rounds of her own ready to go.

It’s quite the wild opening scene — made so much stronger with the in medias res approach — but it’s powerful because the tension is suspended so long, and the scene plays out so carefully. Indeed, this will be the drama’s entire directorial approach, it seems, and that’s what made me love it. A Shop for Killers could have gone either way, but the careful and artistic direction made the first episode a narrative treat. For all the suspenseful and thriller-y elements, it’s always about the story. And that story is rather a sad one.

After the opening scene, we jump back in time a few days and meet Ji-ahn in a police station. She’s just beat up a creepy dude after watching him follow a woman into the restroom, so we learn a few things about her from that alone. When she calls her uncle as her guardian to sign her out, another cop actually answers the phone and tells her: don’t be alarmed but your uncle is dead.

The middle section of our episode follows Ji-ahn as she rides out to the rural place her uncle lived, identifies his body at the morgue, and then plans and attends the funeral. Ji-ahn does all this while totally looking dead inside, but we can’t tell at first whether she’s just in shock, or doesn’t care about his death at all. Each of these scenes is really well-crafted, giving us details we need to know (the “MURTHEHELP” tattoo on her uncle’s arm, the fact that his neck wound has been ruled a suicide), but also building tension from the little that’s said — and because of the characters she’s interacting with. Everyone around seems to be giving her a suspicious secret glance, and it’s unclear how much of a scheme Ji-ahn’s just found herself in the middle of, but boy does it make me suspicious of every character that breathes.

A few more of Ji-ahn’s flashbacks help us understand her story a bit more — one in particular that stands out is a year prior when Jin-man readied Ji-ahn’s dorm room for her, replete with a bulletproof cabinet she could hide in. You know, just in case. Among other strange things, he hammers into her head the importance of numbers, and rattles off her school ID to her (this will surely be important later, right?). We catch a glimpse of their rapport through these flashbacks, too, and it seems like there was a mostly unspoken and totally begrudging camaraderie between them. She tells him things like, “You have the face of a criminal,” but it seems like they might be two peas in a pod.

A few days pass with the funeral proceedings and cremation — and a host of highly suss ajusshis coming and going from both — and now Ji-ahn returns alone to her uncle’s house. Outside of a decent-seeming taxi driver/friend who’s been mourning Jin-man with her, the only person that’s been vaguely helpful is BAE JUNG-MIN (Park Ji-bin).

We see in a quick flashcut that the two were friends back in grade school when Ji-ahn moved in with her uncle, so Ji-ahn is quick to trust him. Jung-min tells her he knew Jin-man pretty well and was helping with his online shop for agricultural hoses (of all the things, this adds such a dose of dry humor!).

When Ji-ahn is alone in the house, though, her facade begins to crack. From telling Jung-min she’s disgusted with the thought that her uncle killed himself, to remembering him in another flashback moment and then bursting into tears in the living room — if we weren’t already rooting for Ji-ahn, this is the scene that puts us on her side.

By accident, Jung-min sees Ji-ahn crying and then sticks around to keep her company… and that’s when the craziness starts. The suspense has been building to this point, because we now recognize the house interior and Ji-ahn’s tracksuit from the drama’s opening scene. So when the plot kicks in, even though we know where we’re going, it’s more suspenseful than ever.

Jung-min found an old cell phone in the bathroom, and they joke that it was her uncle’s burner phone. But when a text comes in about the billions of won that have just been paid, the two go to investigate the “hose” website. Jung-min’s degree in computer engineering quickly pays off and he realizes the website is a front for a shop on the dark web called MURTHEHELP. It’s full of firearms and other weapons for sale.

Ji-ahn and Jung-min are still reeling from the discovery when a chat message pops up in the window, with a customer asking for their merchandise. When Ji-ahn responds that they’ll refund the money, things quickly escalate to: Jin-man is dead and you’re next. Just then the doorbell rings, and it’s a creepy lady in red lipstick that we also recognize from the opening scene, and she’s hellbent on getting inside. It’s here that we close the episode.

A Shop for Killers did so many things right with this premiere episode, but the adept directing is really what made it what it is. The narrative structure and careful pacing allow all the different elements to shine, and as you watch you can see how this screenplay was adapted from a novel. Happily, the script moves with the same articulation you would expect from a work that has a steady and intertwining narrative.

As for the performances so far, Kim Hye-joon always brings so much intensity to her roles, and I got what I expected from her. More of a fun surprise was a derelict, scarred, and unlikable-yet-likable Lee Dong-wook. The fact that he’s the top-billed actor and technically already dead before the drama begins makes the storytelling all the more crucial here. Ostensibly, all of his scenes will be in flashback, and if the scenes we got in Episode 1 are any indication, these flashbacks will be the lifeblood of the plot, and unlock the story as we go.

 
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