A brooding tale of mutual insanity, Hyper Knife (2025), is easily one of the most disturbing yet addictive Korean dramas I've ever watched in my twenty years as a fan of the genre. Neither of the two main characters, both neurosurgeons, were good people. Rather they seemed to be sociopaths, obsessed by the evil within themselves, both of them just as capable of taking lives as well as saving them, and when they did save them they did it more to glorify themselves and fatten their bank accounts rather than to experience the pure joy of healing others.

As I watched this drama, which was intricately laced with film noir touches throughout, I kept thinking to myself, "Hitchcock would have absolutely LOVED this drama!" :) Frankly, my dears, the only reason I didn't give the production a full A+ was because of a few unanswered questions in the flow of the narrative, and because I felt the very end could have been handled in a clearer fashion. For instance, the end credits in the last episode start up but after a few seconds an epilogue sequence abruptly interrupts them, which at first glance could be confusing to the audience. I am sure I am not the only viewer who had to play that epilogue sequence back more than once to decipher its true meaning. We are used to countless flashback scenes in K-dramas, but not always flash-forwards.The actors were magnificent, the cinematography gorgeous, the director Kim Jung Hyun was excellent, the script by Kim Sun Hee needed some extra polishing. 

Prolific actress Park Eun Bin (Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Castaway Diva, Do You Like Brahms?, Operation Proposal, Love Rain, Choco Bank, The Legend, Stained Glass, Glass Slippers, Resurrection, My Love Patzzi) no doubt JUMPED at the chance to play this obsessive, mentally ill doctor character, rather than yet another "good girl" role that she's always played before (like her characters depicted in the dramas listed above). She also might have liked that there was no sincere romance in the story ... instead there was more like a kinky love-hate relationship with an older male doctor who had been her mentor in the story.

Actor Sul Kyung Gu (who has a vast list of classic Korean films on his resume dating back to 1996, such as A Petal, Peppermint Candy, A Brand New Life, Lucid Dream, Oasis, The Book Of Fish, but only one other Korean drama!) also obviously relished playing such a nail-bitingly complicated, flawed individual as the obsessive physician counterpart to the younger Park Eun Bin's disturbed doctor character. His character rarely smiled, and when he did it was usually for some perverse reason that I was actually afraid to ponder over too deeply!

The Story:

Neurosurgeon Dr. Choi Deok Hee (Sul Kyung Gu) is considered the best in his field in the nation of South Korea, having graduated medical school at only seventeen years of age! His specialty is brain surgery, and he works tirelessly at Yeonshin University Hospital operating on a steady stream of patients, frequently winning awards for his brilliant surgical work. He has no wife, no love life at all. Only work, work, work.

Years earlier he had even taught surgeons-in-training his impressive specialty skills, including an ultra-talented female medical school graduate intern named Jung Seok (Park Eun Bin). Jung Seok had been fascinated with the intricacies of the human brain for most of her life. She was thrilled to be given the opportunity to learn delicate brain neurosurgery from this genius and she applied herself to learning more than anyone else at the hospital. She was never afraid of work, work, work. 

In time, though, her often impulsive, sometimes shrill personality caused Dr. Choi to lose patience with her, and their professional relationship began to deteriorate dramatically. At one point Dr. Choi has her dragged out of an operating room for defying him and she attacked him physically, which made him slap her twice, hard on her face, and later made him pull her medical license. Nothing could outrage Jung Seok more than anyone interfering with her work, work, work! It was her life, her idol if you will.

Seok has a boyfriend named Seo Young Joo (Yoon Chan Young, below) whose life she had saved during a brain operation, and he is a medical and personal assistant to her out of gratitude. He is at her beck and call constantly. She doesn't always treat him very nicely, however, since her main focus in life has always been to become an expert in brain surgery, just like her mentor Dr. Choi.

My Question: Why Would A Normal Person Stay With A Psychopath?

After her medical license is pulled Jung Seok begins to work in a pharmacy to make ends meet, along with a nice lady clerk named Young Shin (Kim Soo Yeon), and she also begins to do clandestine, illegal brain surgeries on rich criminal men, gangsters and the like who don't want to get their surgeries done in legit hospitals. Young Joo helps her in this secretive work, aided along by a shady middle man named Min Hyeon Ju (Won Hyun Joon) and by an anesthesiologist friend named Han Hyeon Ho (Park Byung Eun, Lost, Because This Is My First Life). If anyone tries to interfere with her new secretive illegal surgeries Seok promptly disposes of them (choking them to death from behind, with a wire, is her favorite method of execution! Shudder!).

Every day Seok likes to lunch at a cafe across the street from the pharmacy, run by a nice lady named Mari (Hur Jina). However, Mari has a violent brother, an ex-con named Sin Gyu (Lee Tae Young) who still has a police anklet bracelet on his leg, and he often loses his temper with his sister and beats her up. This also infuriates Seok, who watches from a distance.

Sin Gyu develops the hots for Seok and often flirts with her. Seok bides her time, waiting for his ankle monitor to be removed, thinking up ways to dispose of him without being detected. When Seok hears that the ankle monitor has been removed and that Mari will have to close her cafe for economic reasons due to her violent brother's thievery, Seok is infuriated all the more. She entices this devil into her car and then kills him, strangling him with a wire, her favorite method of obliteration. Mari thinks her brother just moved away, like he had stated he would do multiple times. She has no idea he's been murdered. With him gone Mari is able to save her cafe from bankruptcy. Seok buries Sin Gyu on her country property where she owns a cottage and a barn which houses three big black Rottweiler dogs she loves. The police begin to suspect Seok and the chief of police Yang Dong Yeong (Yoo Seung Mok) orders her to be followed.

Then Dr. Choi suddenly shows up to Seok's place and tells her he needs a brain surgery for a serious vein disorder and asks her if she can do it; she laughs at him and turns him down. He knows she is the only other surgeon in Korea who would know exactly how to save his life because she went to school on his own surgical techniques for the condition years earlier. He tells her he will have her medical license re-instated and she still angrily declines.

When Dr. Choi learns that Seok might be arrested for the murder, because middle man Min is quietly informing on her to police, he distracts Min on a city street, brings him into a dark alley and stabs him to death! Now both Seok and Choi are outright murderers, although they convince themselves, of course, that they were killing these people for honorable reasons. (EGAD! PHYSICIANS, HEAL THYSELVES!!!).

Karma, Dr. Choi! Don't Slap A Fellow Surgeon!
You Might Need Her Someday!

Then Choi learns that the police have found a murder weapon that had evidence of Rottweiler fur on it. Choi orders Seok's barn to be burned down and her three Rottweiler pets killed! Now Seok is beyond grieved and attacks Choi with an umbrella. "They're just dogs," he says to her petulantly, "Get over it." (Thankfully later we discover that Dr. Choi's lawyer, Mrs. Ra (Kang Ji Eun, excellent performance), had saved the dogs and hidden them away so the police couldn't find them to match up the dog fur evidence, whew!).

At some point Seok learns about this and finally agrees to do the delicate surgery on Dr. Choi, especially when she further learns he doesn't just have a vein thrombosis problem, but actual brain cancer. He knows, and she knows, that Seok is the only one who could possibly save Dr. Choi's life. An American Korean physician named Alan Kim (Han Joon Woo) is brought to Korea to help with the elaborate surgery, and anesthesiologist Han Hyeon Ho is brought in to help, as well as Seok's devoted as ever boyfriend, medical intern Young Joo.

 

Our infamous epilogue informs us how it will all work out, either tragically or positively. We are still left wondering if the police will ever catch up with Seok and Dr. Choi and arrest them for murder(s). Could they have both moved to another country to escape?

If you are at all interested in watching this strange and complex drama on Disney+ / Hulu I should warn you to take Bette Davis' advice from the classic American film All About Eve: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night!" :)

I do find the series different from the Korean Drama Norm, but in a very disturbing way. It's like when you are driving on a highway and suddenly you see a terrible accident and there's a traffic jam on the road because of it and you can't seem to make yourself look away, it's so horrifically fascinating. Just a fair warning what you will experience watching Hyper Knife. There's even a fairly decent English dub on Disney+ / Hulu for all those viewers who think they aren't capable of reading subtitles along with the original Korean audio. You know what I say to folks who claim they don't want to, or can't read subtitles? "At age 5, when you were learning to read, you read Dr. Seuss books, didn't you, and what were they? Pictures with words. So why can't you do at age 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 what you did at age 5?" ;)

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