Watch the trailer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn2ZCxOxsN0
When we covered the trailer last month, the Spider Staffing Agency was offering 50 times the minimum wage and an induction that might kill you. A few days after all eight episodes landed on Netflix on 30 October, it seems an awful lot of people have signed up. According to the chart-tracking site FlixPatrol, the Korean horror series climbed to No. 2 on Netflix’s global TV chart on 1 November, behind only the French heist drama Lupin, and was top of the pile in 14 countries and territories, including South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Chile, Peru and Nigeria. It also crept into the US top ten at No. 10. Netflix’s own weekly figures are due shortly and should give a firmer idea of how many viewers have clocked on.
For the uninitiated, Lee Jae-wook (Alchemy of Souls) plays Byeon Hyeok-jun, a man who has lost everything, including his mother’s savings, to an online investment scam. A flyer for the Spider Staffing Agency offers a way out, with one rule attached: never tell anyone what happens on the job. The episode titles read like the bottom drawer of a temping agency’s filing cabinet: Convenience Store Rules, A Journey with a Pierrot, Milkman Vlog, Midnight Fantasy Cinema, Clinical Trial, The Walls Don’t Talk, Neo World After Dark and Last Carnival. By episode three, a milk round pays 200 times the minimum wage, which is the sort of pay rise that should make anyone check under the float for teeth.
Director Kim Da-min has described the show as a gift set of stories blending “Napolitan” ghost stories with urban legends, and that’s the key to why it works. Napolitan stories are the rule-based creepypasta popular on Korean and Japanese internet forums: a list of perfectly reasonable instructions for a night shift, until rule seven tells you never to answer a customer who knows your name. Anyone who has worked a late shift at a petrol station will recognise the genre as only mildly exaggerated. It’s a cousin of the SCP Foundation’s containment procedures, or a staff handbook written by something that lives in the walk-in fridge, and it turns every new job into a fresh list of things not to do.
The reviews have been warm, if not unanimous. The South China Morning Post found it ambitious but short on focus, a kinetic ride that can’t always decide whether it’s a comedy, a horror or a piece of social commentary. Heaven of Horror gave it four out of five and enjoyed its inventively strange CGI monsters, while others have praised Lee as a likeably flailing hero and spotted a dream sequence with more than a whiff of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika about it. The Squid Game comparisons are inevitable, since Korean genre television has spent the past five years casting debt as the real monster, but Dead-End Job swaps playground games for zero-hours contracts and throws in a clown.
Will there be a second season? Netflix lists it as a limited series and has announced nothing. Creator Han Jun-hee told the launch press conference that people would have to enjoy it for there to be a next one, which, on current form, sounds less like a condition than a formality. Mr S is presumably drafting the job advert already. Applicants should bring a CV, two references and details of their next of kin.
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