After global breakthrough of Netflix's Squid Game, Apple TV ventures into South Korean content with Dr. Brain

Dr. Brain has not received the launch that you might expect for a miniseries made by a significant South Korean filmmaker, one that is an important building block in Apple TV+’s attempt to upgrade its international content. The debut of the show on Thursday was announced less than two weeks ago, and even then, there was confusion about the actual date it would premiere in the US. The ritual press day with cast and crew, just announced Tuesday, is taking place a week after the premiere. That seeming lack of planning could be a result of Apple focusing its attention on the release of the show in South Korea; Dr. Brain, created by Kim Jee-woon, is the first original series from that country on the service.

But it is hard not to suspect another culprit: Netflix’s  Squid Game , and the sudden avalanche of attention it has brought to South Korean television drama. Maybe someone at Apple woke up and said, “Hey, we’ve got one of those, too!”

And the one they have is, in its relatively quiet and only slightly sensational way, better. Quiet and unsensational are not qualities always associated with Kim, who was happy to engage in excesses of gore or hyperbolic action in movies like I Saw the Devil and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. In Dr. Brain, he is operating in a calmer, subtler mode reminiscent of his best work, the polished horror film A Tale of Two Sisters. Kim has been a genre-hopper in his career, and the six-episode Dr. Brain, his first TV series, blends formats he has worked in before. In outline, it is a straightforward mystery, as brain scientist Sewon Koh (Lee Sun-kyun) searches for the son he thought he buried but who may be alive; he is helped by a police officer, Lt Choi (Seo Ji-hye), who is initially skeptical but comes around to his side. But it is also a science-fiction story: Koh has developed a process for “syncing brain waves,” allowing him to tap into the memories of the recently dead. The fate of his son is wrapped up with a conspiracy involving this technology, and there is a hubris-of-science theme that ties Dr. Brain to Dr Frankenstein, at the high end, and the mid-1980s helmets-and-electrodes thrillers Brainstorm and Dreamscape, at the lower end. Throw in some film noir embroidery, in the person of a laconic private eye (Park Hee-soon) who also helps Koh out, and you have got a genre stew. And that is before you get to the mind-meld sequences, when Koh goes inside the heads of murder victims, random corpses, and in one droll sequence, a dead cat. Kim takes these as opportunities to inject visual pizazz into the generally naturalistic mise-en-scène, in the form of giallo and Asian-horror motifs. Finally, it would be a shame not to mention that melding with the cat gives Koh occasional access to feline powers of vision and agility, making him a part-time superhero. That may make Dr. Brain sound like a mess, but it is surprisingly coherent. Kim is firmly in control — his unobtrusive professionalism ensures that the shocks, reversals, and revelations are part of a smooth, modulated ride. And that smoothness carries you past the nagging questions, mostly involving why someone did not do the obvious thing that this sort of story tends to raise. The real barrier to entry for some viewers may be the sentimentality of the season’s beginning and ending — the need for Korean TV dramas to assert themselves as soap operas to meet their domestic audience’s expectations. But Kim pours on less syrup than the norm, and for most of its run, Dr. Brain is a classy and absorbing entertainment. Dr. Brain is streaming on Apple TV+. Mike Hale c. 2021 The New York Times Company