☆

2021's Beyond Evil (괴물) is truly a show of all time. It's about both the necessity and the limitations of law, and what happens when people are inevitably forced to make their own justice. It's about hypocrisy and the terrible things we do for love, including love of self. It's about neurodivergence, ableism, PTSD, and how we both see and unsee those things; how we infantilize some disabilities while dismissing others; how readily we read guilt into behaviours that stem from trauma. It's about how grief can tear a hole twenty years deep and seven families wide through a community, and the impossibility of ever stitching such a wound closed. It's about assumptions, subversion, consequences: how thinking you're right is not the same as being right. It's about the violence of misogyny, the pressure of conformity, and the question of whose voice deserves to be heard. It's about what it costs to know the truth. But most of all, it's about Han Juwon wanting to fuck that old man so bad it makes him look stupid. And I think that's beautiful.