Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sweet Home’ Season 3 on Netflix, The Final Season For This Gory Korean Horror Drama

Human beings become raging monsters in the Netflix horror drama Sweet Home . But the thing is, some of them want to stay that way. That’s the central conflict as we enter Season 3, which marks the final eight-episode run for this series based on a webtoon by Kim Carnby and Hwang Young-chan. Song Kang returns as Cha Hyun-su, a noble if conflicted monster man, alongside Go Min-si, Lee Si-young, and Lee Jin-wook, the latter of whom will co-star in the upcoming second season of Squid Game . The world these people inhabit is overrun by monsterization, but that’s not enough for some, who intend to corrupt its last few pockets of stability with their diabolical plans for a new and terrible form of human evolution.

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Opening Shot: After a lengthy recap of scenes from season Sweet Home Season 1 and Sweet Home Season 2 – which is nice of them, because this show has a lot going on – Sweet Home rejoins Hyun-su (Song) and Lee Eun-yu (Go). “Wasn’t Hyun-su in control?” Eun-yu asks. “The real Hyun-su, not you…”

The Gist: What does she mean by this? Well, in Sweet Home , one of the tenets of monsterization is how the transformation fucks with your memories and emotions. People’s mutations become specific to their desires, and for some, an internal struggle for control of the host body emerges. (While it’s not always easy to tell who’s in control, if somebody’s eyes turn black, it’s a good bet they’ve got monsters in the brain.) As season 3 begins, Hyun-su is confident he can use the enormous spiked wing mutation growing out of his shoulder for good, especially in the protection and reclamation of Seo Yi-kyung (Lee Si-young) from the monstrous forces that torture her.

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While Hyun-su struggles with Yi-kung in a collapsing asphalt cage of emotion, valiant special forces soldier Kim Young-hoo (Kim Mu-yeol) is fending off a throng of monsters that attack him and his fellow soldiers. It’s a sequence that reveals two things about Sweet Home . First, its DNA lies in zombie shows, whether we’re talking about K-zombie stuff specifically or anything out of the incredibly, impossibly sturdy Walking Dead universe. Basically: lurching creatures hungry for human flesh and the individuals who improvise their kill shots on the fly. Second, Sweet Home is not a series that short-changes the horror. The monsters here are represented with a mix of practical and digital effects, but they’re always imagined with the grossness machine stuck on its highest setting.

Ever since people started mutating into monsters, the military and shady medical professionals have been interested in controlling the phenomenon for their own gain. Like Dr. Lim (played with enjoyable creepiness by Oh Jung-se), whose experiments on human-monster hybrids like Hyun-su spun wildly out of control, to the point that Pyeon Sang-wook (Lee Jin-wook), another former patient, has mastered and weaponized his monsterization. Sang-wook has taken the doctor into his little band of monster freaks, they’ve got goals that involve the extreme bodily harm of South Korea’s remaining regular humans, and they’re en route to one of the region’s last strongholds. Which is concerning. But maybe not as concerning as what’s already there, given the pretty terrifying glimpses we get of what Chief Ji (Kim Shin-rok) is hiding in an underground lair.

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What Shows Will It Remind You Of? If you’re watching Song Kang in Sweet Home and thinking how his handsomeness is so powerful it defies monsterization, then you might be interested in seeing his turn as an aspiring ballet dancer in the Netflix K-drama Navillera . And given the often zombie-like behavior of the monsters in Sweet Home , it’s worth considering it alongside recent South Korean zombie fare like #Alive and All of Us Are Dead .

Our Take: The idea of human emotions becoming so powerful as to burst from people’s bodies in monstrous form has always made Sweet Home a little more intriguing than your usual zombie concept. Why have people simply transform into undead brain eaters when they can instead be hungry for human flesh AND be tortured by their own transformation? “You can’t die even if you want to,” Cha Hyun-su says at one point in Sweet Home . “You’re a monster human.” The series doesn’t always maintain its focus, and tends to leave story threads unraveled, like it’s ensuring its own future by putting characters in new predicaments and just leaving them there. But Song Kang is great as Cha Hyun-su, whose humanity and wish to help people is constantly at odds with his evolving monster form, and Lee Jin-wook is playing Pyeon Sang-wook as a kind of monster-form supervillain who gets off on his own cruelties. The handful of performances central to Sweet Home are its saving grace whenever the story becomes a dark, hard-to-follow muddle.

Sex and Skin: Well, gross, hybridized monster-human nudity, but that’s about it.

Parting Shot: Hyun-Su and his big spiky monster wing have seemingly saved the day. But with more monsters on the loose and his adversaries amassing their forces, it’s bound to be a short lived victory.

Sleeper Star: Oh shit, what kind of monster is that ? This is a question you’ll ask more than once during episodes of Sweet Home , which never runs out of newfangled ways to render some truly disgusting creatures. Like, is that fifty legs attached to a giant mouth? It’s startling, the monsterization creativity, and full of respect for horror’s traditions.

Most Pilot-y Line: “The fruit is almost ripe. It’s different this time. Something extraordinary is going to happen. We’re going to the stadium.” Pyeon Sang-wook is returning to the scene of the crime from Sweet Home Season 2, and he’s bringing evil reinforcements.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sweet Home can get a little confusing with its characters switching back and forth between human and monstrous forms, and their motivations sometimes remain unexpressed. But the monster-making is always inventive, and often wonderfully gross, which amplifies the horror elements whenever the generally strong performances throughout the series can’t fully save it.

Johnny Loftus ( @glennganges ) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.

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