Apocalyptic fiction shares commonalities, themes, and familiar story beats no matter the world-ending cause. In genre film, zombies tend to be the most common root cause of civilization’s collapse, rendered even more conventional thanks to George A. Romero’s popular Living Dead franchise. Whether it’s extreme climate shifts or infectious undead, apocalyptic tales tend to turn a sharp eye inward and ruminate on humankind’s ability, or lack thereof, to cope amidst catastrophic devastation. Despite trailers suggesting a more adrenaline-pumping action-horror invasion, Netflix’s Sweet Home instead falls into the same patterns of traditional apocalypse tales that give precedence to human drama.
Based on a webtoon of the same name, Sweet Home follows the ensemble group of characters residing at the Green House apartment complex. At the forefront is Cha Hyun-soo (Song Kang), a depressed young man still reeling from losing his entire family. Shortly after moving in, he and other neighbors notice a few neighbors exhibiting extreme aggressive behavior that leads to self-harm in some cases and bloodlust in others. Worse, they’re turning into monsters. This anomaly isn’t exclusive to the building; the entire world plummets into a bizarre infection that transforms humans into grotesque monsters. Leaving the uninfected with nowhere to go, they band together inside the building to fend off monsters and survive.
At first, thanks to an action-heavy first few episodes and uniquely designed creatures, this series sets up a video game-style horror story full of monster mayhem. It soon settles into the traditional pattern of zombie apocalypse stories, though, particularly Dawn of the Dead. First, it establishes some of the warning symptoms of a budding monster transformation, intercut with the disparate group of characters that will eventually turn to infighting as supplies dwindle. Some are heroic at the outset, like firefighter Seo Yi-kyeong (Lee Si-young), and some are morally dubious, like presumed gangster Pyeon Sang-wook (Lee Jin-wook). There are supporting characters that don’t offer much beyond fodder and others that pop up to serve the narrative when needed. Sweet Home tries to give all of them equal attention in an increasingly convoluted fashion, complete with random flashbacks inserted at the clumsiest of moments.
The more the 10-episode season progresses, the more it loses interest in the monsters altogether. They still appear and present foils for whoever crosses paths with them, but the rules behind them constantly shift for convenience. Monsters can’t be killed, except when they can- the how and why shifts at whim. They’re a constant threat, except when they need to go away to give the drama room to breathe. When the final few episodes should be gearing up toward something action-heavy and grand, it introduces more evil humans to showcase this show’s real villain- humanity. The viewer will have to fill in many of the narrative blanks themselves, thanks to incredibly clunky scenes and choppy editing.
That there’s no real sense of world-building or geography makes it that much harder to follow along. In a later episode, characters escape through a monster-filled garage, and the scene ends with a crash. In the very next scene, those same characters inexplicably show up in the lobby to save another from near death. You just have to assume they clearly completed their mission and imagine how they evaded the hordes of unstoppable beasts. Sure, this setup requires suspension of disbelief, but Sweet Home often stretches it beyond plausibility straight into confusion.
The monsters do look cool in design, but those designs are marred by unflattering VFX. The series also front-loads the best designs for the first half of the season while relegating the more generic creatures to the sparsely loaded second half. The series gets repetitive when inserting monster encounters, too. When Imagine Dragon’s “Warriors” kicks in, expect everything to slow down to highlight the monster madness and the character’s heroics stepping up to face it. Rinse and repeat. The favored and on-the-nose song recurs many times over the season to amplify the poignancy of the monster encounters, but with diminishing returns.
There are so many unanswered questions left by the season’s end, along with a hook that sets up a potential follow-up, but it’s hard to care. The convoluted narrative structure changes what little rules it establishes for contrived storytelling’s sake. The cheap VFX can be off-putting, but the series does go heavy on the bloodshed. Sweet Home makes some of its deaths hurt, but not enough to fully invest in a series that loses steam the further it progresses. What sprints out of the gate and sets up an exciting creature-filled horror series quickly comes to a slow crawl zombie apocalypse that we’ve seen many times before. It just swaps out the zombies for monsters.
Sweet Home is available to stream on Netflix now.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/reviews/3645630/tv-review-netflixs-sweet-home-replaces-zombies-monsters-repetitive-apocalypse-tale/
No comments:
Post a Comment