Shin Ha-kyun
Lee Dong-sik
Beyond Evil
“These days... It's dangerous to trust someone.”
2021
Ended • 1 Season • 16 Episodes
Director: Sim Na-yeon
Overview
As a killing resembling a cold case resurfaces in a small town, the chase for the truth falls on two policemen who each harbor secrets of their own.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 16 episodes
- First aired
- Feb 19, 2021
Cast
12 people
Reviews
6 min readThe Small Town Where the Floor Won’t Hold
latestnetflix.com's read is that i kept waiting for Beyond Evil to relax into a familiar shape — the tidy procedural, the noble partnership, the little burst of catharsis at the end of each episode.It doesn’t. Or rather, it only pretends to.
Sim Na-yeon’s 2021 series is built like a murder mystery, but what lingers with me is how patiently it strips away the comfort that mysteries usually provide. Every answer arrives with a new bruise attached. Every confession seems to contain a second, uglier confession underneath.
That’s part of why the show landed so hard in South Korea and beyond: it came out in the middle of a wave of prestige crime drama, yet it didn’t behave like a prestige object at all. It was smaller, meaner, more interested in the rot underneath local respectability than in flashy plotting. And because it’s only one season, 16 episodes long, it has the tightness of something that knows exactly how much damage it wants to do.
No promise of a next chapter. No soft sequel tease. Just the full, sealed pressure chamber.
What makes the series so effective is that it understands the way suspicion spreads through a place. Manyang looks ordinary enough at first glance — that slightly drained, overcast small-town feel familiar from a lot of Korean crime fiction — but the camera keeps returning to thresholds, doorways, corners of rooms, the spaces where people pause before speaking. Sim Na-yeon shoots the town less as a community than as a network of eavesdropping surfaces.
A conversation in a police office doesn’t feel public because anyone is around; it feels public because the walls themselves seem to be listening.
I’m still thinking about Shin Ha-kyun’s Dong-sik, who moves with the weary caution of a man used to being watched and misunderstood. Shin has played morally compromised men before, but here his face has that peculiar slackness of someone holding back a thought he knows will make things worse. He can make a joke land like a warning.
He can also stand perfectly still and suggest panic in the muscles of his jaw. Opposite him, Yeo Jin-goo gives Joo-won a brittle certainty that feels almost pathological. Yeo has spent years on screen looking younger than his characters, and that youthful energy becomes a weapon here: Joo-won’s impatience, his upright posture, his quick pivots from courtesy to accusation all make him seem like a man trying to outrun doubt rather than solve anything.
Their pairing is the engine, of course, but not because they become friends in some easy, redemptive way. The pleasure is in watching them refuse one another, then accidentally reveal themselves in the refusal. I thought of old-school detective duos, sure, but also of Antonioni’s people at cross purposes in modern spaces, each one speaking to fill a void neither will name. Beyond Evil uses the investigative partnership as a way to study masculinity under strain.
Audience Opinions
Limited evidence
"A dark, atmospheric crime mystery whose psychological depth rests heavily on the intense central dynamic between Shin Ha-kyun and Yeo Jin-goo."
Directed by Sim Na-yeon, the series immerses audiences in an intricate small-town investigation defined by shifting suspicions and buried secrets. [latestnetflix.com]( read is that the psychological drama relies on persistent tension and morally ambiguous characters rather than conventional police procedural formulas.
What viewers praise
- Compelling Central Dynamic The tension-filled interplay between Shin Ha-kyun and Yeo Jin-goo provides a gripping core for the mystery.
Common complaints
- Demanding Dramatic Tone The bleak atmosphere and deliberate, character-driven pacing require considerable patience from viewers.
Recommended for
Fans of Korean crime thrillers Viewers drawn to complex psychological mysteries Followers of Shin Ha-kyun and Yeo Jin-goo
Buzz & Rumors
Public reports"What are tears? I don't cry."
That is Yeo Jin-goo at wrap, eyes swollen, insisting the water on his face was weather. JTBC's making-of tape from Beyond Evil is almost comedy if you ignore the plot. He tests a golf club as a weapon, complains that the night is cold, then stands in a downpour long enough that he can barely open his eyes 
. When the camera swings toward Shin Ha-kyun, towel on his head, Yeo puts a hand over the lens. "No, I have to protect him! Don't film him!" . The Korean title is Goemul. Monster. The poster asked who the monster is. latestnetflix.com's take is that the set tape answered with two soaked leads covering for each other.
Shin had already named the job. Lee Dong-sik, he told a press conference, is the cop "who becomes the monster to take down the monsters" . Yeo said Han Joo-won is fighting "not to become one of the monsters," an elite Seoul detective transferred into the fictional town of Manyang and paired with the very officer he was sent to investigate , . Director Shim Na-yeon wanted a local, retro temperature, "as in the style of Memories of Murder." She and writer Kim Su-jin waited for these two and did not pretend otherwise. "It has to be the actors I want" . Shin, smiling, called Yeo "Little Boy," the child who had played the younger version of Shin's character in the 2006 film No Mercy for the Rude. Yeo was nine. Shin joked that if he had known the kid would grow up this handsome, he would have recast his own flashbacks. Then the punchline. "He's so gentle, but when the camera's on, he gives me a death stare" .
That stare is the show. Sixteen episodes on JTBC from February 19 to April 10, 2021, about 70 minutes each, produced by Celltrion Entertainment and JTBC Studios . A demoted sergeant. A commissioner's son. A 20-year-old string of killings that looks like Hwaseong until the credits remind you it is fiction filtered through Bong Joon-ho, not a true-crime file . Lee Do-hyun turned up as teenage Dong-sik. Choi Sung-eun ran the butcher shop. Choi Dae-hoon played the best friend who knows too much . Forbes flagged the nasty joke in the pairing. Joo-won is assigned to the man he came to bury . Yeo later told The Korea Times the shoot "was like putting a period on a series of questions about how I should act." Shin, he said, kept arriving with a new version of Dong-sik. "I came to trust myself" . The finale did a 5.991 percent nationwide rating, first in its slot, the series high , .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQCOdcBAWtU
Netflix's English-subbed trailer kept the same dare. A murder that looks like a 20-year-old cold case. A demoted detective and an ace rookie. Who is the real monster among them ? The 57th Baeksang Arts Awards then gave the drama three trophies cable thrillers rarely take home together. Best Drama. Best Screenplay for Kim Su-jin. Best Actor for Shin . It was also in the Grand Prize conversation and did not win that one . A Japanese remake has been announced with no broadcaster and no date, which is how these things sit until someone actually casts them . The rain tape is still the better souvenir. Yeo swearing he did not cry. Shin under a towel. Two men who had already shared a child-actor credit, now asking, on purpose, which of them is the monster.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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