Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Frog’ On Netflix, About A Mysterious Visitor To A Summer Rental House Who Turns The Owner’s Life Inside Out

When a series, especially one promising to be a thriller, starts out slowly, a viewer doesn’t know what to think. It seems like the first episode is slow on purpose, but it makes the person watching it wonder if the whole series will be this slow or if things will pick up. That’s the issue we have with a new Korean thriller on Netflix.

THE FROG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The camera pushes through lush forest, and we see a house in the middle of the tranquil setting. A Bobby Bland record is spun on a turntable. Then as we see flashes of violence, a voice says, “A giant tree fell in the forest, and no one was around to hear it. Did it make a sound, or was there nothing but silence?”

The Gist: Jeong Young-ha (Kim Yoon-seok) owns that house in the middle of the woods; since his wife died, he’s been renting it out during the summer tourist season; his neighbor Park Yong-chae (Lee Nam-Hee) rents his house as well. They both bring their linens in massive blue totes to a local laundry/cafe, where the two of them run into each other. Young-ha is thinking of stopping rentals for the season, including closing the pool.

In town, Yoon Bo-min (Lee Jung-eun) drives to her new job, as the town’s police chief. The officer that finally arrives at the empty station thinks she’s there to report something. A photo in her box has a picture of a hotel and the inscription: “2001. My first case.”

Also in town, the Lake View Motel is run by Koo Sang-jun (Yoon Kye-sang) and his wife, Seo Eun-gyeong (Ryoo Hyoun-Kyoung). He seems to want to do anything but sit at the front desk, especially overnight, as he sits with is friend at a neighboring store eating ramen, leaving the desk unmanned.

Young-ha finds a mysterious woman, Yoo Seong-a (Go Min-si) and her son Si-hyeon (Jo Yeo-Joon), stuck on a dirt road. He gets the car out and turns it around, because the direction she was going in was wrong. He’s surprised to later find her outside of his house, with Yong-chae showing his house to her because the AC is broken at his place. The woman and child agree to rent the place, and Young-ha refills the pool for the kid to use.

Back at the motel, a man in a baseball cap checks in after his car runs out of gas. He wants a second-floor room, but gets a suite on the fourth floor. The next day, a young patrol officer (Ha Yoon-kyung) is on her first day on the job, and she takes a call that has mostly silence on the other end; we see that it’s Eun-gyeong, holding the receiver and frightened into near-silence. The young officer, instead of dismissing the call, follows through and soon first responders are on their way to the motel. When Sang-jun sees that, he rushes back, and is horrified by what he finds.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Frog reminds us a bit of Dark, but for reasons we’ll state below, in semi-spoilery fashion.

Our Take: Written by Son Ho-young and directed by Mo Wan-il, The Frog is slow and somewhat subtle in its approach. We see scenes with Young-ha at his vacation rental house, hanging out with Si-heyon and getting towels for the kid and Yong-chae in the rain. Seong-a finds the Bobby Bland album in the record collection of Young-ha’s late wife and they listen together. We also see Sang-jun slack off at his motel, falling asleep at the front desk and generally not taking his ownership of the place all that seriously.

What Son Ho-young is trying to set up is that both the house and the motel are in a bucolic setting, one where you would expect murder and other violence to happen. But what he keeps in the dark, except for that photo of the motel that Bo-min has in her box at her new job, is that the house and the motel are being portrayed in two different timelines: The house is now, the motel is in 2001. The young patrol officer who takes the call on the motel murder is in fact Bo-min, as well.

We’re not sure if this is something that we’re supposed to figure out during the first episode or not. We’re guessing not. There are really very few clues that tell us that the motel timeline is from 23 years ago. No one’s holding flip phones, which is usually one of the biggest ways to figure out if something is taking place in the naughts. Otherwise, unless you’re looking super-closely, it really feels like the two stories take place in the same timeline.

It makes us wonder if Son’s efforts to misdirect the viewer backfired. Until the very end of the first episode, we have no idea exactly why we’re seeing these moments at both the house and the motel. Then, suddenly, the bloodiness is ramped up; Sang-jun finds out he rented a room to a serial killer, and Young-ha finds blood all over the Bobby Bland record. Of course, those last scenes are designed to get us to click “Next Episode,” but we wonder how quickly things will ramp up from there.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: “Do you know what they call people like us? Frogs,” says a voice over. Young-ha starts running from his house after he finds the blood-covered LP.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the show’s director of photography, who makes the area where both crimes take place look very expansive and inviting.

Most Pilot-y Line: Young-ha takes a call while food shopping; his daughter tells him she won’t be visiting when she said she would. He assumes it’s because she met someone. It’s a scene that feels superfluous, but it may pay off later on.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re giving The Frog a marginal recommendation mainly because we think the story is intriguing. But it may move at too languid a pace for viewers to really get into before the really thrilling aspects of the story kick in.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.