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Featured: A Review of the Korean Drama “SKY Castle”

About “SKY Castle”

SKY Castle’s Native Title is “SKY 캐슬” in Korean. It was written by Yoo Hyun Mi and directed by Jo Hyun Taek. It is a mysterious, intense drama, with complex psychological undertones.

Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnVETFW4DWM

Uploaded by: Doramax English

The Synopsis of “SKY Castle”

So basically MyDramaList (https://mydramalist.com/30740-sky-castle) describes it as:

“Han Seo Jin, Noh Seung Hye, Jin Jin Hee, Lee Myung Joo all live with their families in SKY Castle, a luxury private town where wealthy doctors and professors live. It was built by the first president of Joo Nam University, which is the best university in Korea. All of the women wish for their children to enter prestigious universities and are actively supporting their education. One day, Myung Joo suddenly commits suicide following her son’s acceptances into Seoul National Unversity as a medical student. The community is shocked by that and Myung Joo’s family quickly moves out from SKY Castle. However, the community is even more shocked, when Lee Soo Im and her inferior-birth family move in. Soo Im takes it upon herself to help the stressed-out children and challenging the other women of SKY Castle, whiles questioning her own ways of supporting her step-son.”

The Good Points of “SKY Castle”

I loved the intensity of “SKY Castle”, despite the sometimes trivial issues going on. This is a show which deals with completely ordinary and sort of mundane subject matter, and serious problems both in a manner that makes them feel immediate and important. “SKY Castle”s cinematography is excellent to the point where each scene enhances the specific emotions of the moment to the point where the audience automatically empathizes with the characters.

The characterization in this show is brilliant. Each and every character is multifaceted, motivated, understandable, likeable and dislikeable at the same time. They each have their good points and their flaws. In fact the character with the least amount of development/backstory/complexity is Woo Jung, a teenage boy.

The actors in this show are absolute pros, they make you feel each and every emotion, to the point where I noted myself, laughing when they laugh, crying when they cry, even for the villains. They act out each scenario so convincingly that oftentimes I felt like they were real people.

The Bad Parts

The characters in “SKY Castle” can oftentimes be very dislikeable. Even the heroes do not seem very good people, and while I prefer this to whitewashing their characters, it can still be a little much at times. This means that I was unable to watch the entire drama in one go; I had to see it in bite-sized pieces.

The intensity of the drama results in sometimes a huge level of absurdity which jerks you out of the narrative.

Some of the child actors are not that great at acting, so their portrayals are at times unconvincing.

The drama lags at times due to the mundane events it portrays, sometimes I felt like skipping scenes.

Overall Thoughts

You can probably tell by the dearth of bad comments that I barely have any complaints about this drama. I would 100% recommend it.

I rate this show a solid 9/10.

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