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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Hello Monster" Episode 16 Final

The essential conflict in "Hello Monster" boils down to feelings and logic. Hyeon is a man without feelings who struggles when memories of past events force him to come to term with feelings. The detectives, by contrast, are perfectly at ease with feelings but have always needed help when it comes to dealing with the basic logic necessary to make deductions and come up with effective plans for catching criminal perpetrators. "Hello Monster" is able to achieve convincing catharsis on one of these points.

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So, let's start with the good. Right until the end Hyeon and Seon-ho are portrayed as individuals with meaningful, heartbreaking personal struggles. What it's come down to for both of them is that they just want reassurance. Hyeon and Seon-ho had the bad luck to be cornered by a father who made bad logical decisions based on emotional impulse. But this doesn't mean that, for them, emotions are and always will be bad. By the end both brothers have accepted that they're different from other people, and that's OK, because having a brother with similar problems proves that they're not freaks.

Where the finale stumbles somewhat is with Joon-young. He certainly has good moments- at multiple points Joon-young genuinely looks rather confused when the situation does not turn out the way he was expecting it to. Joon-young has always been called "Uncle" by Seon-ho for good reason. Joon-young isn't a father figure. He is, at best, an inadequate replacement for an actual family. For some people that's enough. For other it's not. But then we get to the ending and...

...Well, look, this is one reason why I wish the mystery genre would branch out beyond just murder. It makes things too serious. I can see what happens to Joon-young as having meaningful depth if we look at "Hello Monster" through the lens of being an exploration of psychopathic personalities. That's always been the drama's biggest strength- none of the psychopaths devolve into caricature, and it's always been clear that they see the world completely differently than we do.

But what kind of epilogue is this? The main points of resolution are the Ji-an / Hyeon romance, which was never really that essential, and the jail visit which doesn't tell us much more than we already know. The hospital visit was just plain disappointing, because it was too open-ended. While well-constructed overall, in the end "Hello Monster" didn't leave me quite as pleased as I was expecting because it was too much of a genre mash-up to satisfyingly conclude on all possible points. Which looking back, might be part of the reason why the ratings for this drama have been rather lackluster.

Review by William Schwartz

"Hello Monster" is directed by Kim Jin-won-I and No Sang-hoon, written by Kwon Ki-yeong and features Seo In-guk, Jang Nara, Choi Won-young, Lee Chun-hee, Park Bo-gum, Min Sung-wook and more.

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