Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 킹덤/Kingdom.
Kingdom is a 2019-2020 Netflix series set in Joseon-era Korea, following the collaborative adventures of an exiled prince, a country doctor, and a scrappy mercenary who's pretty much the only one in this entire zombie outbreak who has a damn gun.
I have very complicated feelings about zombie media. See, in case you hadn't noticed, horror movies are never actually about what they're about. And a whole lot of modern zombie stories wind up being a) metaphors for fears of immigration by mindless subhuman hordes hell-bent on infecting the good, pure people, b) white male fantasies about how the downfall of civilization will put them back on top again and then all you DEI people will be sorry! and/or c) ways to let your protagonists just kill the shit out of a whole lot of humans but it's okay because they're not really human. Soooo yeah. A lot of zombie-flavored things I like, I have to like them despite all that.
But Korean zombie media tends to avoid a lot of these issues. (Maybe because Korea's experience with invasion is less Fox News Lies About Scary Brown Migrant Caravan Again and more [long list of actual historical incidents]? Who can say!) Kingdom is no exception. It's smart zombie fiction, where the zombies are mostly here to make the already-complicated mundane geopolitical situation just that much more of a fucking nightmare.
This is a bloody, violent, grimy, often downright gross drama, so if you're squeamish, you may want to pass on this. If you're into horror, though, and into zombie horror especially, go on and sink your teeth right into these five reasons I think you should watch it.
1. No one here has ever seen a zombie movie
You know how one of the frustrating things about watching a zombie property is seeing a bunch of otherwise competent, regular people act like they had all their cultural awareness of zombies surgically removed, down to making up cute words that aren't "zombie" to keep from saying the word "zombie"?
Everybody in this show has the excuse that they are living several centuries before even the possibility of zombie movies.
This story starts out pretty standard for a historical drama: a sick king, a pregnant queen, a crown prince in a precarious position, questions of succession, accusations of treason, wealth and class dynamics oppressing the poor, shady backroom politics -- you know, the usual stuff. And it never stops being about all that! It just also has zombies. Evil bastards don't stop being evil just because decomposing hordes are breaking down the door. In fact, that just makes them worse! And our heroes are at ends because they have no natural immunity to the genre they've walked into.
Sure, there are some moments of comic relief, but for the most part, Kingdom plays its premise absolutely straight-faced. How would 17th-century Koreans deal with a bunch of walking corpses? With period-appropriate tools, tactics, and mindsets!
In your standard modern zombie setup, everybody has guns, and then some special badass rolls in with a katana and everyone oohs and ahhs. In Kingdom, the wealthy have swords, the common folk maybe have farm implements, and there's one measly matchlock rifle in the party. For a few lucky headshots, you've got archers. For everyone else, things are about to get real up close and personal.
The characters also have period-appropriate worldviews that both inform their reactions to the problem and are frankly bizarre by modern standards. What if you had to deal with zombies in a place with cultural taboos against dismembering or burning dead bodies? What if people felt compelled to treat the corpses of peasants differently from corpses of nobles? What if the scholars won't act in their own defense because it's insulting to ask them to wield weapons? What if you can't ask certain important people certain questions because it's literally treason to do so?
The real moral of Kingdom is that there's not a situation so bad that devotion to Confucian principles can't make it worse.
2. That scrappy bastard
I'm not going to play favorites here-- Wait, what am I saying, of course I am. It's Yeongshin.
You know how, in any given zombie movie, your hapless protagonists survive because early on they find a party member who's about ten levels higher than they are? That's Yeongshin. He's cagey as hell about his shady past -- to the point where we don't even learn his actual name -- but he's going to come in real handy here, because he is also the aforementioned only guy with a gun, and he fucking knows how to use it.
And okay, I'm exaggerating about the gun shortage, but not by much. Firearms are rare, you need training to be able to operate them, and no matter how good you are, they still take time to reload after each shot -- if they even fire at all. (Also, ignore the part where everyone's aim is far better than shitty matchlock rifling should allow.) Guns are not the go-to weapon in this zombie situation. You can't just shove a bunch of pistols in everybody's hands and count on at least a few lucky shots. You could amass all the period-appropriate firepower you wanted, but without specialists, it'd be useless.
Yeongshin is fueled by some very reasonable guilt, since, uh, a nonzero amount of the shit that goes down is kiiiiiinda his fault. But I love that instead of giving him a death wish, it makes him even more determined to survive and do what he can to mitigate the fallout of his unintentionally terrible decisions. He knows he's far more useful alive, so to hell with taking the easy way out. Whether his opponents are living or undead, he's going to make them wish they hadn't messed with him.
This is a good place to note that the whole cast is great, from the thunder-voiced head of the evil family to the prince's wife-guy manservant to the doll-faced bitch queen. And obviously Ju Jihoon and Bae Doona are captivating every second they're on the screen, because they are absolute acting powerhouses and I love to watch them work. His Prince Lee Chang and her physician Seobi are compelling, memorable main characters who perform the important zombie-movie function of being the people you care about when they get put into dangerous situations.
But I walked away from this unable to stop thinking about Yeongshin. Bare-headed in a world of very meaningful (and often very silly) hats, he's feral and bitey and completely unfit for polite society. So of course he's going to wind up side-by-side with the second most you-need-to-be-respectful-to-him guy in the land.
More than anything, I love watching him work. He's a very physical character, but all his stats are in speed and agility, so he will just literally throw himself full-body against doors or into fights and let his momentum do the work. His actor, the handsomely exhausted-looking Kim Sungkyu, brings such a great physicality to the role. Yeongshin may be the Gun Guy, but he's not sniping from the back row. He's right there on the front lines, pulling off stunts none of the other characters would dream of trying. I cannot stress enough what a delight his action sequences are. It's such a good visual counterpart to the zombies, who also have no sense of bodily self-preservation.
And speaking of the zombies...
3. Zombie rules
I find that Korean zombie properties are the best in particular at zombie physics. Their directors seem very interested in pondering exactly what the weight of that many bodies would do. The answer is usually pretty gruesome and visually fascinating!
Kingdom's main use of zombies is by volume. While there are a few (memorable!) one-on-one scenes, the show delights in seeing just how many zombies it can fit in the frame. The danger is always from the sheer number of hostile bodies. You can use those numbers against them, if you're clever, but wait too long and you run the risk of being completely overwhelmed.
I've seen some people criticize the zombie extras by accusing them of not moving like zombies, which is the kind of nonsense you say when your only exposure to zombies is Slow Zombies. Kingdom's zombies are Fast Zombies -- they don't shamble, they swarm. They all just plow on full speed ahead until something stops them, and they definitely don't watch where they're going. Those extras do some incredible work flinging their bodies over obstacles and into solid objects. I sure hope one of the benefits of all that voluminous period-appropriate costuming is how much good padding you can probably stuff under there.
Continuing the thought exercise about what a 17th-century zombie outbreak would look like, Kingdom does some clever things with putting humans and zombies alike in situations you wouldn't find in the modern world, ones made possible only by the time period. I really like that it never forgets that part of the fun of this whole enterprise is making the best of the social and technological concepts that would have been present then. It doesn't feel like a modern zombie movie with incidental hanbok -- it actually makes the most of what a rural medieval setting both gives and takes away.
The rules Kingdom makes for its zombies are also an interesting take. You, the modern viewer, know how zombies work in general, but you don't know all the quirks of these zombies in particular, so you're learning at the same time the characters are. And sometimes you learn wrong! Sometimes you have to rewrite your whole strategy because you realize at a critical moment that both you and the characters misunderstood something very badly.
...And yeah, okay, it plays a little fast and loose with those rules sometimes, but so what? You know how this works! You know that the lead actors will dodge more and get bitten less than the random extras will. You know that named characters will last longer than their NPC counterparts. If you're going to hold that against it, maybe horror movies aren't the thing for you. Go do a Rubik's Cube or something.
4. The parts without zombies
Plenty, plenty of people have made the Game of Thrones comparison, which ... yeah, sure, I can see it. It wouldn't have been my first thought, but I get where people are coming from. And you know what, if you're a Game of Thrones enjoyer, you'll probably like this too. It hits a lot of the same beats and has a lot of the same vibes. It's kind of like if you shrunk Game of Thrones in the wash, until there were only two warring families and not a conlang in sight.
This show isn't historically accurate to the letter -- think of it more as AU Joseon-Era Korea, where specific people are fictional but the larger context is more or less the way things would have been. You never get given a specific year, but from technology and various context clues, you can kinda narrow it down to the 1600s. It never commits to a single year, though, which dodges a lot of nitpicks. Its fictional aspects are nice, too, because that means you don't have to know any real history at all. The show will give you all the information you need to understand the campaign setting, just in case your knowledge of medieval Korean dynasties is not up to snuff.
The conceit of the series is that some very specific devious political backstabbing and corruption has been happening since before the show began, making everything vulnerable to catastrophe. Unsurprisingly, the sudden appearance of zombies does not magically mend those rifts and make everyone come together! In fact, the reason the zombies are happening at all is related to these treasonous power plays, and while we never learn the full story (see my later note on the drama's ending), we get a whole lot of it. And it's a good, complicated reason! Here we return to the idea that zombie movies are always metaphors for something else. Set against the backdrop of multiple Japanese invasions during this period, Kingdom sure does have some things to say about the dangers of considering certain lives disposable in the service of the greater good.
I will be the first to say that IT TURNED OUT MAN WAS THE REAL MONSTER ALL ALONG storylines are tedious, so I'm glad Kingdom didn't decide it needed to beat that drum. The truth is, nobody's surprised when the bastards who have treated other people like shit all their lives continue being bastards in a crisis situation. It's the Joseon Dynasty. Everybody's locked into a rigid neo-Confucianist hierarchy. They don't need an apocalypse to reveal how much the people at the top would sell them all for a single corn chip. They've been clear on that one for a long time.
What this means is, if you're not traditionally someone who goes in for zombie horror, but you like a good political thriller and can roll with some supernatural elements, you might consider giving this one a shot anyway! It's not some hugely complicated and sophisticated plot, but it's still plenty to chew on. (See what I did there?)
5. Time to spend that Netflix money!
This show is gorgeous. It looks beautiful and it sounds beautiful. It's shot beautifully against beautiful sets and even more beautiful landscapes. Everyone's wearing beautiful costumes. What little CG there is is even beautiful. It's just visually a treat.
Light is such an important part of the show that I can't not comment on Kingdom's use of it, production-wise. The show is often shadowy as hell, but in a high-contrast way, as opposed to the awkward near-blackness of so much prestige TV. Even when it's dark enough that faces and details are obscured, there are still light sources that provide visual interest. Besides, I'll cut it some slack because it is a horror property. You should be watching it in a dark room anyway! And sure, there's some awkward day-for-night stuff, and transitions around sunset can be downright goofy, but if that's the worst of the jank we have to suffer through, it's fine.
As beautiful as it is, it's also very ugly. The story takes place over a period of time so short that barely anyone has time to change their clothes, much less take a bath. The grime just accumulates: sweat, dust, mud, sewage, smoke, spit, and all kinds of blood and viscera. By the time the story's done, everyone looks realistically beat to shit. (Bless those poor makeup artists, having to keep such close track of all the damage characters have suffered.)
I feel as though I should note for context that while I'm a horror movie fan, I'm still pretty squeamish when it comes to gore. I made it through Kingdom okay, but there were definitely parts I had to watch through my fingers. It hits the realism middle ground that gives me the wiggins, where it's neither absurdly chaste about bloodletting nor dumping comedic buckets of corn syrup on the actors. It suits the tone of the show perfectly! Just, you know, if you're a little tender (like I am), be ready to look away from the screen sometimes.
Korean historical dramas sure do have a real advantage on the wig front, in that most everyone is wearing some kind of historically appropriate hat or headband that covers the places their wig joins. And then you have Yeongshin, who looks so good all shaggy because that's clearly at least mostly Kim Sungkyu's real hair.
I've seen a lot of shitty low-budget horror in my day, sure -- but I've also seen a lot of shitty high-budget horror, where a production has a lot of money and spends it all on exactly the wrong things. Kingdom uses its funds wisely. It's not extravagant (except for the queen's amazing outfits). There are practical effects aplenty and some beautifully framed shots. It gets a little gimmicky with the camera work in season 2, but you know what? It's fun! The gimmicks are action-movie fun, and I will not criticize something for having fun in the midst of some otherwise grisly subject material.
It's also got great rewatch value. There are just enough secrets running throughout that going back for a second viewing makes a lot of things make more sense -- in, of course, a horrible way! But that's just the way we like it.
caveat: Beware of cliffhangers
The show is two seasons long, and it's clearly set up in expectation of a third season ... which never happened. What did happen was a separate, largely unsatisfying movie that tells the backstory of the cool character you meet in the last ten seconds of the last episode.
But that's it. There was also a prince-focused prequel planned, but that got scrapped before production even began, and that was four years ago. I'm not holding out much hope that we'll ever get anything more from the Kingdom universe.
I am not super-bothered by this, though, and here's why: The two seasons are enough to wrap up the main political plot. Most of what's left is zombie lore, and I am so bored by zombie lore. Still, would I have watched these characters roll around in that zombie lore for another six episodes? Without question! Are there loose ends I wish had gotten resolved? You better believe it! Do I want to know what the super-duper secret behind the zombies is? I sure do!
But I also don't feel like I got cheated out of an ending. Those two seasons hang on a story that's 90% the political succession crisis and 10% figuring out where on earth this whole zombie thing came from. That means what you get feels like 90% of an ending, which is pretty damn good by my standards.
Still, it's enough of a bummer that I feel I should give a little heads-up about it -- working, as I always do, on the principle that something can't disappoint you if you know it's coming. If you go in with the right mindset, you can be happy with what you get while not being sad about what you don't. And what you get in Kingdom is, in my little horror-loving opinion, worth it.
(Also, am I giving it extra credit points for how it did not sink my ship? Buddy, you better fucking believe I am.)
Ready to watch?
Netflix money means Netflix. It's got two seasons, and then you can make the decision about how much you care about the movie. I found it mostly disappointing with a few really cool moments, so it's your call if that's enough to justify your watching it.
The series itself is a pretty quick watch, too -- twelve episodes total, all 30-50 minutes long once you skip the opening and closing credits. You can blow through the whole thing easily in a single weekend, which is not something you can say about your standard Korean television season of sixteen hour-long episodes.
And then pretty please come back and do fan stuff for it! I couldn't find exactly what I wanted so I had to write my own. One Quiet Night remains one of my comfort fics that I self-soothe by rereading, which may be a weird thing to say about a smutty gay fanfic about a violent zombie drama, but hey, we all make our own fun.
Also, I know I usually end these with a cute behind-the-scenes photo, but this promo video is too adorable to leave out, so we're going with it instead. It's slightly spoilery for season 1, but not in a way that makes sense out of context. And if you didn't have a crush on Kim Sungkyu already, well, you will after this!
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