Watch the trailer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn2ZCxOxsN0
Anyone who has spent time on a jobs board knows the type of advert. Competitive salary, dynamic team, must be comfortable in a fast-paced environment. Netflix’s new Korean series Dead-End Job takes that last requirement rather more literally than most HR departments would dare. The streamer has just released the main trailer for its eight-part mystery-horror-fantasy, which lands on 30 October, nicely timed for Halloween and for anybody who has ever dreaded a Monday morning.
Lee Jae-wook (Alchemy of Souls) plays Byeon Hyeok-jun, a young man drowning in debt who spots a strange flyer for the Spider Staffing Agency. The pay starts at 50 times the minimum hourly wage. There is only one rule: never tell anybody what happens on the job. Anybody who has read a Thomas Ligotti story, or sat through a single episode of The Twilight Zone, will already be shouting at the screen. When a recruitment firm names itself after a creature famous for luring flies into a web, the small print hardly needs reading.
Each gig sends Hyeok-jun somewhere apparently ordinary, beginning with a convenience store, and each turns out to be very much worse than the induction suggested. The footage so far offers a wrecked shop, swarming moths, milk deliveries that go badly wrong and a clown nobody would trust with a children’s party. It is, in essence, Mr Benn re-imagined by the Korean horror industry: as if by magic, the shopkeeper appears, and this time every costume comes with something that bites. Lee Hee-jun plays the agency’s boss, the mysterious Mr S, who in the trailer breezily dismisses his recruit’s complaints about the nightmare as nothing more than a cushy bit of part-time work. Every office has one.
Go Min-si (Sweet Home) plays Yeon-ju, an investigator digging into the agency’s affairs, while Kim Min-ha (Pachinko) is Hyeok-jun’s spirited younger sister Ji-yun, whose personal motto is that poverty is scarier than ghosts. That may well turn out to be the most chilling line in the series, and quite possibly the most accurate thing Netflix has said all year.
The talent behind the camera is promising. Director Kim Da-min wrote Netflix’s excellent A Killer Paradox, while series creator Han Jun-hee (D.P., Weak Hero Class 2) oversees the whole enterprise, with scripts by Kyung Min-sun and Lee Shin-ji. The show was originally called Perfect Job, and the change of title represents a rare moment of honesty in entertainment marketing.
There is a long and grimly logical tradition at work here. Since Squid Game, Korean genre television has repeatedly cast debt itself as the monster, the thing that drives perfectly sensible people to sign contracts no sane person would touch. Dead-End Job simply swaps the playground games for zero-hours shifts, and adds moths. The convenience store setting is a neat touch too: the late-night shop, all strip lights and humming fridges, has always looked like a place where the walls between worlds wear a little thin. Here at SFcrowsnest, we have done some fairly bleak temp work over the years, though admittedly with fewer clowns.
All eight episodes stream from 30 October. Whether Hyeok-jun survives his probation period is the central mystery. Whether he ends up with a P45 or a headstone is presumably the twist.
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