Everything changed for Jeong Ji-an (Kim Hye-jun) when she was seven years old. The sudden reappearance of her uncle, the enigmatic Jeong Jin-man (Lee Dong-wook), seemed to set in motion a series of events that would leave her grandmother dead from a mysterious illness and her parents murdered by unscrupulous men just hours later at the funeral hall. Ji-an, too, would have faced the same fate, if not for a last-minute intervention by Jin-man.
The pair would soon move to a small countryside village and live in a small house surrounded by nothing but vast, empty fields, where they would stay for the next decade. Life would slowly return to normal for the headstrong Ji-an, who, by the start of A Shop for Killers, had started anew as a university student. But, as with anything that involved Jin-man, nothing was ever the way it seemed, and Ji-an’s world would turn upside down once again.
Ji-an returns to that remote home in the middle of nowhere to clean up the last pieces of her life after Jin-man is found dead in an alleged suicide. Bae Jeong-min (Park Ji-bin), an old classmate from elementary school, stops by to give her a helping hand and a shoulder to cry on, but the pair soon discover a discreet, dark web ecommerce site linked to Jin-man that puts their lives in danger at the hands of trained killers.
From the opening scene of A Shop for Killers, Disney+’s new original K-drama sets the stage for an enticing and thrilling murder mystery with high stakes. A mysterious death? Check. A list of menacing suspects? Check. A slow drip of clues? Check. All while following a fish out of water who’s slowly discovering what exactly is going on at the same time as the audience. It’s unfortunate, then, that the series has – at least in its first two episodes – a number of logical inconsistencies and plot holes that would raise some eyebrows.
Given the grave danger they were in, it’s confusing at the very least how neither Ji-an nor Jin-man changed their names. In fact, a number of Jin-man’s old schoolmates even came to show their respects during his wake, as if it was no secret where they were. It’s also curious how Ji-an wouldn’t have questioned, or at the very least noticed, how Jin-man was able to save her from killers when she was seven – or his other peculiar possessions and behaviours, such as having a gun in a country where it’s illegal or buying her a bulletproof wardrobe.
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Thankfully, lead actors Lee Dong-wook (of Tale of the Nine Tailed fame) and Kim Hye-jun (Netflix’s Kingdom) make quick work of the tightly paced script. Not a minute of A Shop for Killers is spent on boring filler, while the few moments of calm are emotionally impactful and genuinely gripping. The mystery of who is and why they’re after Ji-an after all these years is just the cherry on top.
A Shop for Killers – which is a live adaptation of the novel The Killer’s Shopping Mall by Kim Ji-young – makes for a fun and appealing popcorn watch, one that fires all the right synapses in your brain. It’s just enough to keep you hooked – that is, if you’re willing to let the plot holes slide.
A Shop for Killers is available to stream on Disney+ in select regions internationally, and on Hulu in the US.