Binge-r #168: Kingdom + Atlantics
Night of the Living Dead: zombies swarm in Kingdom
KINGDOM S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All six episodes now streaming
Equal parts gruesome horror and grandiloquent period adventure, the first Netflix original series from South Korea is a welcome palate cleanser after a busy year’s streaming. Set in the 17th century, when the Korean peninsula’s monarchy held life and death power, but punctuated with readily recognisable 21st century failings, Kingdom is a pandemic thriller, bloody horror outbreak, and noble quest rolled into one ravenous narrative. The enjoyment of the show, which was adapted by Kim Eun-hee from her digital comic series, resides in how fluidly it ties these elements together while advancing the plot. There is a moment in the second episode where a drone shot looks down on a perfect ceremonial lake, only to cut to a weighted-down body being dumped into it, which sinks down beside the many already there. Here the dead are heard in many ways.
When public posters proclaim that the realm’s king is dead, the court’s ruling clique says he’s being treated for smallpox and blames crown prince Yi Chang (Ju Ji-hoon) while torturing scholars to further the repression. It’s a crackdown orchestrated by the king’s chief courtier, Cho Hak-ju (Ryu Seung-ryong), who already has his daughter married to the king and pregnant, which threatens Yi Chang’s succession. The crown prince wants both answers, and to secure his future, and even as he begins by seeking a physician who treated his father, he’s also getting a sense of the broken country he’s supposed to rule and how official corruption is ingrained. He soon finds evidence something is very wrong, plus survivors such as a hardy doctor, Seo-bi (Bae Doo-na) and a mysterious warrior, Yeong-shin (Kim Sung-kyu).
The tone can shift considerably, with Yi Chang accompanied by the sometimes jolly bodyguard Moo-Young (Kim Sang-ho), but the show doesn’t stint on the zombies. It mixes suspenseful sequences with full-scale swarming, as these creatures run and bite, while in a nod to vampires they avoid the sun. Many of the nocturnal sequences, with their pools of candlelight, are immaculately shot, while the official cover-up is punctured by groups of zombies that have horde-like numbers by the third episode; it’s a disaster those in power don’t want to acknowledge, which is an all too relevant connection to now. The zombie genre has looked tapped out in recent years, but the likes of the Australian film Cargo (also on Netflix) and now Kingdom are thankfully putting new life back into the undead.
The Ghost of You Lingers: Mame Bineta Sane (Ada) in Atlantics
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
ATLANTICS (Netflix, 2019, 106 minutes): Longing draws a remarkable response in Mati Diop’s debut feature. The French-Senegalese filmmaker has an innate gift for capturing faces in telling moments, and she begins with the love-struck young couple Ada (Mama Bineta Sane) and Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore). The former has a marriage arranged with the scion of a wealthy Dakar family and the latter is a construction worker working on a shimmering high-rise project that hasn’t paid him in months. When Souleiman jumps a boat for Spain in search of work he disappears, at least until he’s sighted near a fire lit on Ada’s wedding night bed. With a visual sense keyed to long psychologically intense takes, Diop moves between social realism and supernatural uncertainty, acutely sketching the political failings and double standards that are never far from the surface in Senegal. Arresting but not scary, Atlantics (needlessly anglicised from the original Atlantique) reveals inequality and updates Gothic drama, and what makes it so impressive is that the two strands feel like one.
New on Netflix: Fracture (2007, 113 minutes) is an old-fashioned legal thriller with Ryan Gosling as the young prosecutor trying to convict Anthony Hopkins’ arrogant murderer; Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill headline Event Horizon (1997, 96 minutes), a gore-heavy horror descent set on a missing spaceship that traps the rescue crew sent to retrieve it.
New on SBS on Demand: The 1981 mini-series remains the benchmark, but there’s much to like in Julian Jarrold’s film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (2008, 133 minutes), particularly Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw in the lead roles as doomed friends in the 1930s twilight of Britain’s aristocracy.
New on Stan: The Wolf of Wall Street (2014, 180 minutes) is Martin Scorsese’s blackly comic take on American excess, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a Wall Street grifter alongside Margot Robbie and a wildly compelling Jonah Hill; an under-appreciated romantic mystery from Pedro Almodovar, Broken Embraces (2009, 123 minutes) stars Penelope Cruz in a story of past misdeeds told through recrimination and cinematic misdirection.
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