Flower of Evil (2020) begins with an intriguing scene (it is featured in the MVs so it’s hardly a spoiler). A man has both his hands tied to a bar at the bottom of a pool and the water has risen to just above his head. He is struggling to breathe and he is knocking on Death’s door. Before long a woman swims to him and tries to frantically untie him. Who is he? Who is she? How did he land up in that dire situation? The first episode will answer some of the questions and provide even more. Chances are you will be in for the long haul because the white-knuckled plot will grab you and like me, you will invite the storyteller to do his worst.
One could easily glean from the first episode that Baek Hee Sung (Lee Joon-gi) is a man with a dark past and when I say dark I mean it involves serial killing. At this point, he has changed his identity and somehow gets a new lease of life with a beautiful wife Cha Ji-won (Moon Chae-won) who is a police detective. They have a precarious daughter whom they dote on. However, the dream is shattered when a friend from his past Kim Moo-jin (Seo Hyun-woo) who is now a journalist recognises him.
The first episode is superbly done. The way it efficiently lays down the principal characters and their motivations is brilliant. The cross-cutting between the husband and the wife, each scene showcasing the depravity of the man and the intelligence of the woman as she solves a crime that has many twists, is engrossing. The foundation is effectively laid but in my mind this felt like a 2-hour movie. However, I was willing to be proven wrong.
So very wrong was I who thought the story doesn’t have the range for sixteen 70-minute episodes. The electrifying plot uses the long format well, constantly forcing you to change your feelings about the two main leads. The nastily tangled storyline knows when to dole out crucial information and knows when to withhold them. You can liken this clever exercise to handing out jigsaw pieces to you but never giving you the whole picture to see how it all fits. The whole thing progresses at a pace that leaves one breathless and wanting more, but also leaves room for thought. For someone who eats thrillers like burgers, I must confess I was totally caught surprised a number of times. This is also not something you watch while checking your social media because you will miss something important.
Flower of Evil isn’t high art; it’s pure escapist entertainment with enough storytelling smarts to make you willingly look past the blatant implausibility even when it drifts into the absurd.
For this reviewer, there are other elements that make this series climb above the run-of-the-mill thrillers that pour out of the Kdrama factory. One, how the female protagonist is painted is not as a long suffering wife who will stand by her husband even if he is potentially a serial killer. Detective Cha is a realist and only believes in things she can see. She is not blinded by her love for her husband and will make him eat a bullet if her life is threatened. Two, it has the ability to take potentially stereotypical roles and make them full people. For instance, the police are not represented by only one competent protagonist and all the rest are bumbling idiots. I find the secondary character of veteran Detective Choi Jae-sub (Choi Young-joon) a refreshing one and he is Detective Cha’s equal. Lastly, the plot is absolutely unpredictable, managing to subvert my expectations at every twist and turn, and if that’s not the hallmark of a good drama series, I don’t know what is.
There were so many Kdrama series like Itaewon Class, The World of the Married and The Uncanny Counter that failed to nail the elusive ending, but not quite so with this one. Essentially, it ends in episode 15 with a variation on the one in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) and quite satisfyingly. But like many Kdramas, Flower of Evil had to play the melodrama card in episode 16. It was lumpy and seemed to be limping towards the finishing line. I told myself no way it is going to make me cry, but it did. You got to hand it to the Koreans, they sure know how to play this trick and my tears were earned.
Flower of Evil is a clever title with an oxymoronic twirl. It essentially opines that underneath the facade of the characters hides a deadly secret. This series also takes the study of a husband and wife relationship to a whole new level. With its stellar acting, electric pacing and twists galore, Flower of Evil is a white-hot nail-biter of a series. This one will take 1120 minutes from you just like.
Written by Daniel Chiam
BookMyShow Singapore 
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