The Bequeathed: Episodes 1-2 (First Impressions)

by solstices

Hauntingly subtle, poignantly evocative, and strangely unsettling, The Bequeathed is off to a strong start. It moves with the steady assurance of a narrative that knows what tale it wants to tell, and if I hadn’t already been drawn in by its achingly complex characters, I’d have been convinced by the compelling deftness of its storytelling.

Editor’s note: This is an opening review only. For a place to chat about the entire drama, visit the Drama Hangout.
 
EPISODES 1-2

At the crack of dawn, on a desolate country road, an elderly man ambles past an open field with a bottle of makgeolli in hand. The silence is peaceful, as early mornings are wont to be, until it turns eerily ominous. With only a scarecrow and the distant mountains to bear witness, the man begins to foam at the mouth. As a shaman proceeds with her ritual — elsewhere, and seemingly at a different time — the dying man desperately reaches out for help that will not come.

It’s an opening scene that aptly encapsulates the disquieting atmosphere of this drama. Underscored by a soundtrack that alternates between placid tranquility and discordant dissonance, The Bequeathed toes the line between the ordinary and the bizarre. Everything is all right, until it isn’t. Characters act in ways that are just short of normal, yet not entirely inscrutable, and you’re left on tenterhooks waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s the type of suspense that haunts you with the barely perceptible possibilities of what lies between the lines.

After that sinister overture, we’re taken back to the mundane. YOON SEO-HA (Kim Hyun-joo) is a contract teacher diligently working towards a full-time professor position, and when the detective agency she’d commissioned sends her photos of her cheating husband YANG JAE-SEOK (Park Sung-hoon) and his mistress, Seo-ha’s unperturbed demeanor suggests this is old news to her.

She isn’t given the time to ruminate upon it, though. Her phone rings with a call from the police, informing her that her uncle — the man from our opening scene — is dead. Seo-ha’s bewildered by this sudden turn of events, because she hadn’t known of her uncle’s existence in the least. For one, her father had abandoned her when she was just seven years old. To Jae-seok’s relief, Uncle doesn’t owe any debt, but he’s left behind an inheritance of an ancestral burial ground that now belongs to Seo-ha.

It only gets stranger from there, because Seo-ha is stopped outside the morgue by an unfamiliar man. Claiming to be the village chief YOOK SUNG-SOO, he informs Seo-ha that he’s already organized Uncle’s funeral, since the whole village adored him. There’s something deeply unsettling about the way Kim Jae-beom drawls his words that immediately raises goosebumps, coupled with his unblinking gaze and the grin that never quite reaches his eyes. It all feels very curated, like a mask of theatrics and manipulation.

As if one perplexing figure wasn’t enough, we get another in the form of Ryu Kyung-soo. Accosting Seo-ha at Uncle’s funeral and lamenting his miserable fate in contrast to her successful life, he declares that he’s her younger half-brother KIM YOUNG-HO. His wailing is anguished and accusatory in a manner that toes the line between unwarranted and pitiable, and I’m torn between wanting to know more and wanting to keep him twenty feet away from Seo-ha.

The encounter leaves Seo-ha deeply shaken — not just because of Young-ho’s transgressions, but because he may actually be telling the truth. Long ago, when Seo-ha was still a student, she’d tracked her runaway father down using a return address and witnessed him playing with his new son.

Since trace amounts of thallium were detected in Uncle’s makgeolli, raising the possibility of homicide, detective CHOI SUNG-JOON (Park Hee-soon) is put on the case. He attends the funeral organized by Sung-soo, which is so packed to the brim with raucous villagers and piping hot food that it may as well be a village festival. Sung-joon carries himself with a nondescript silence that allows him to seamlessly blend in, and coupled with his perceptive observation, he soon gleans key information.

Sung-soo is the contractor of the redevelopment project that aims to build a golf course near the village, and there’s a sack of thallium hidden at his construction site. His acquaintance KIM KWANG-SOO, the development head of Jijo Construction, offers to purchase the burial ground from Seo-ha. What she doesn’t know is that the burial ground is the last plot of land holding back the construction project, since Uncle had refused to sell, which explains why they’re eager to get their hands on it.

All leads point to Sung-soo, but when he’s brought in for questioning, he deflects the blame to Kwang-soo. Claiming that he merely convinced the villagers to sell their land in exchange for a cut of Kwang-soo’s profit, Sung-soo works himself up into an aggrieved indignance, as if he’s genuinely wronged by the police’s accusation. But is he?

On the detective team, we also have PARK SANG-MIN (Park Byung-eun), who seems to nurse a mighty inferiority complex against his sunbae Sung-joon despite rising through the ranks faster than him. Not only does he pick fights over trivial issues, but he also leverages on his position as team leader to disparage the extra investigations that Sung-joon carries out solo. It’s easy to dislike Sang-min because he’s spiteful, tetchy, and doesn’t seem to be contributing much to the case.

Then the drama hits us with a double whammy. Sang-min’s limp is the result of old stab wounds, inflicted by a teenager. The identity of that boy? Sung-joon’s son. He’d been bullied over his father’s occupation and forced into a fake kidnapping that was supposed to end with him stabbing his dad, but his rescuer — and thus, his victim — had been Sang-min. The guilt Sung-joon carries in the aftermath is our answer as to why he does all the investigative legwork, but allows Sang-min to claim all the credit. It’s a gut-punch of a flashback that instantly recontextualizes their relationship, upturning everything we thought we knew, and it does it with so few scenes but so much emotional impact.

There’s something plaintive about the way Sang-min still calls Sung-joon “hyung,” and how Sung-joon instinctively reverts to “Sang-min-ah” during a private (and one-sided) argument, that makes me hope for reconciliation. These men are deeply hurting — one lashes out, while the other accepts it quietly like it’s his cross to bear — but it’s precisely this hurt that reveals they still care.

I have to take a moment here to laud the drama for how well it’s set up its characters to be subtle foils to one another; so much is revealed through their interactions, and their contrasting responses to the same situations. Seo-ha is mellow and placid, but you get the feeling that beneath her enigmatic exterior there are potent emotions brewing. In contrast, Jae-seok is vacuously self-important and insensitive in a dryly hilarious way, plugging his nose in the morgue and mouthing off tactlessly more often than not.

Even our apparent antagonists, for all that they both make my skin crawl, are more different than they’d seem at first glance. Young-ho may have gotten all up in Seo-ha’s personal space, yet for all his boundary-crossing leering, he’s not exactly aggressive despite his creepiness. As for Sung-soo, I can’t say the same. His sudden, truncated bursts of anger feel disconcertingly raw, almost like glimpses into his true nature. Sung-soo conducts himself with an affected affability, but it’s uncanny enough that it comes across as a deliberate veneer.

The investigative mystery is plenty engrossing, but the second episode takes it up a notch and weaves in the occult horror I’ve been anticipating. An argument — which has Seo-ha throwing the proof of Jae-seok’s infidelity in his face and kicking him out of the car — ends with Jae-seok dead in a ditch the next morning, a bullet hole in his head. The nearby bullet shell belongs to a hunting rifle that’s thirty years old, and Seo-ha recalls that her father had owned one. At a makeshift altar for said father, out in a field, Young-ho burns a straw effigy alongside a photo of Jae-seok.

When Seo-ha returns home to her city apartment, she witnesses Young-ho leaving the apartment building with bloodstained hands. Then, she’s met with a horrific sight. Her door and its surrounding walls are covered with glyphs and a painting of a three-headed bird, all drawn in blood. It spurs a flashback of a shamanic ritual, with her father bound in the center of it as the whole village watches his exorcism.

What’s particularly interesting about the blood drawing is that the three-headed bird typically symbolizes protection from misfortune, not a malicious curse. It seems Young-ho may have drawn a makeshift talisman for Seo-ha, but as for his rationale and his motive? Enigmatic as ever. Furthermore, the bird is usually depicted with a single leg, not two — a mistake, or an intentional distortion by Young-ho?

Something I really like about this drama is how muted and mellow it is, in both tone and pacing. There are no dramatic crescendos or overwrought frights, and the only jumpscare we get is a barking dog. It makes the narrative feel true to life, allowing its rare outbursts of conflict to land harder because they’ve been pent up all this while. The inexplicably odd behavior and peculiar incidents surrounding our heroine feel all the more discordant and incongruous, too.

When the implacable Seo-ha finally breaks down, it’s over something trivially mundane, and it’s so deeply relatable. Ever since our very first introduction to her, she’s been holding everything in, unable or unwilling to process the significant setbacks. Seo-ha carries her sorrow in a way that’s etched into her temperament but not her behavior; she doesn’t mope over her bypassed job promotion, and she doesn’t weep over her husband’s passing. It’s only when the hanging rod of her wardrobe collapses and the clothes come spilling out that she bursts into tears, unable to pull herself together any longer.

It speaks to the strength of the writing, and the depth of the portrayals by the veteran cast, that the gradual build of the narrative is compellingly slow rather than frustratingly so. There’s nuance tempering every line and history woven into every encounter; these are such human characters, and there’s so much for us to interpret.

This drama manages to convey so much through so little, which makes for such understated yet powerful storytelling. So far, it feels as subtly suspenseful as Forest of Secrets, with a tinge of the contained peculiarity of Beyond Evil’s village, crossed with the eerie folklore of The Guest and Revenant — and I mean this as high praise, because I loved all these dramas. The Bequeathed is a slow burn, but it’s keeping me invested with how deliberately and effectively it doles out information. I have faith that the rest of its tale is likely to be well worth the wait, and even if it isn’t, I think I’ll still enjoy the way it’s told.

 
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