Save Me

Overall Rating: A (lots of A+ in this show, but some pacing/story progression issues)
Subtitles: No complaints. Strong, fluent subtitles.
Brief Synopsis: A family gets taken in by a cult. The daughter, with the help of some boys she met in high school, vows to take it down. Watch it on Netflix here.

Ending Type: This is a happy ending overall. This is not a romance, so if you came for romance you will be disappointed. However our heroine achieves her goals and manages to find happiness, and our heroes find peace with their situations and are pushing towards their own futures. Crazy cult leader is dead, Apostle Jo and the Governor are arrested, and while some cult members are still out doing their thing they are genuine and/or harmless in their desires.
Characters:
Im Sang Mi (Seo Ye Ji)
Han Sang Hwan (Taecyeon)
Seok Dong Chul (Woo Do Hwan)
Woo Jung Hoon (David Lee)
Choi Man Hee (Ha Hoe Jung)
Spiritual Father (Cho Seong Ha)
Apostle Kang (Park Ji Young)
Apostle Jo (Jo Jae Yun)
Im Joo Ho (Jung Hae Kyun)
Full review:
This one is not for the faint of heart. It’s about a cult so that is a given, but in the first two episodes topics include: inappropriate touching of a minor, multiple instances of intense bullying that includes sexual assault and intimidation as well as actual violence, teenage suicide, the implication of torture, another teenager attempting murder than then getting his back broken.
That’s the first two episodes, folks. The rest of the show is filled with a series of other serious and disturbing situations and topics. They are all handled with the appropriate horror and gravity, but it can be really, really hard to watch. The entire set up is very suspenseful as well, so even scenes where nothing went wrong were really stressful to watch due to the sounds/music/camera angles.
That said, this was an absolutely enthralling depiction of a cult and of small town corruption. The cult leaders (Spiritual Father, Apostle Jo, Apostle Kang) were all at once sinister and charismatic, and they left you wondering if they actually believed what they were preaching or if they knew they were frauds and were doing it entirely for the power. I loved how the answer was complex but given– Kang ultimately believed, to the extent that she was willing to tear the Spiritual Father down for being a false prophet. Jo, unsurprisingly, believed nothing. The Spiritual Father was a mix of the two, a con man who had somehow bought into his own story, was deeply convinced of his own divinity, mostly sold on the lie he’d created.
I enjoyed the four guys who were determined to help Sang Mi free of the cult, though I think they did lack a little in character development. I loved them all, and I cheered for them, but the focus of the show was so much on the cult that they were kind of just tools to help Sang Mi out. Dong Chul was by far the most dynamic and interesting, even though Sang Hwan was painted as the ultimate hero. It was kind of a weird dissonance in the show, since Dong Chul had come to Sang Mi’s rescue before, they had an understanding because of it, and he was the one who actually infiltrated the cult and helped her from the inside. Like don’t get me wrong Taecyeon carried his part well and Sang Hwan was a likable hero who was very morally straightforward and integrity driven, but that was kind of it. He wasn’t particularly dynamic and didn’t have a lot of his own self-motivation, it was just, “I fucked up before, I’m gonna do it right this time.”
The heart of the show was Sang Mi, who was an absolutely phenomenal character and portrayed beautifully by Seo Ye Ji. Her fire, defiance, and strength were incredible to behold. She was all power and fury despite being let down by all of the adults in her life, losing her brother, and being held captive by a cult. Her bravery and conviction were outstanding, and her final voiceover got me in the feels.
I have so many things I could say about this one because each of the individual stories inside the cult was worth a novel itself, but I’ll just end this by saying: this is not for the faint of heart, but if you can handle heavy subject matter and relentless intensity, this is absolutely worth a watch.
High Points: The portrayal of a cult and the extremism of its members, the writing of Sang Mi’s character, the development of so many of the characters, the overall acting. Additionally a huge strength was the feel of the show and the cinematography– very creepy, very suspenseful, very intense.
Low Points: Some of the story pacing– the time given to some back stories felt disproportionate, the time given to some other characters (like the one rando thug) relative to their importance to the story was out of whack a bit. Some episodes featured one story heavily and barely touched on other characters so people who were supposed to be central characters often felt secondary to the story (like our main boys in most of the first half of the drama). None of it was egregious, but it was off enough that it impacted my overall rating of the show.