A fascinating and scary body horror with Jeon So Nee and Koo Kyo Hwan giving their best performances.
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| Image Credit: Netflix |
Parasyte: The Grey, the Korean miniseries with elements of the body horror subgenre directed by Yeon Sang-ho is available from April 5, 2024, among the titles in the Netflix catalog. The long-awaited television adaptation of the exceptional manga Parasyte – The Unwanted Guest by Hitoshi Iwaaki puts us behind the camera with the director known for directing the blockbuster zombie movie Train to Busan.
The international title is Parasyte: The Grey, which is, more precisely, the spinoff of Iwaaki's comic - a story of brain-eating monsters set a few months after the invasion of alien parasites outlined in the original work. The three leads are Jeon So Nee as Jung Soo In, Koo Kyo Hwan (Seol Kang Woo), and Lee Jung Hyun as Choi Joon Kyung.
Parasyte – The Grey: in the plot, humanity must defend itself from monsters and mutants who change their faces and mow down people
The story of Parasyte – The Uninvited Guest has already been adapted with an anime series and two live-action films. The one wanted by Netflix is the first live-action transposition outside Japan, a dark adaptation and even more oriented towards action. The opening scene is a brutal attack by some monsters during a festival, it shows us the attack on the protagonist Jung Soo In, who realizes that she is no longer the same person. A beginning that does not bode well (and does not excite us).
But as we move forward in the diegetic line, the show starts to show her face just like the larva (the parasite monster that entered Jung Soo In's body – the mutant with the dual personality) does. Humanity must therefore face the threat of monsters (which are unidentified parasites) that change their faces and literally mow down people. These creatures violently take control of men, gaining more and more power. After the violent initial attack and the first studies to counter them, the "grey team" is formed led by the reckless and fanatic Choi Jun-kyung (Lee Jung-hyun) to unmask and eliminate them all.
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| Image Credit: Netflix |
A fascinating and at the same time scary body horror, with two protagonists who give their best performances
Hitoshi Iwaaki's work represented a considerable piece of Japanese comic and animated fiction, above all thanks to the author's interesting vision. It is not a simple body horror that is screwed into a plot, in turn serving splatter scenes (the organisms showing growths from which the most horrendous things emerge) but also an examination of sociality.
The Netflix show puts a socio-political slant before this objective with a dark initial scene in which a drastic and, alas, "almost desirable" reduction in the human population is described (if the mission would be to protect the environment, save the universe from the phenomenon of consumerism). The proposed solution is established by the arrival on the scene of these ferocious monsters, who have landed on the planet some time ago and, in the meantime have evolved and organized into a gang, while South Korea could be the first country to try to stop them...
Parasyte – The Grey: evaluation and conclusion
Jeon So Nee and Koo Kyo Hwan offer their best performances in this successful body horror, violent and less sentimental than the original work; made up of unpleasant experiments and facial transformations. It veers above all towards social criticism and action-thriller and remains a fascinating and at the same time frightening show: a war on the trail of monsters, in which it is necessary not to let one's brains be "taken over", and where the sense of direction is found following phenomena common to waves…