Year Released: 2015
Genre: Thriller
Main Cast: Ko Ah Sung, Park Sung Woong, Bae Sung Woo, Kim Eui Sung, Ryoo Hyoun Kyoung
Netflix came through with Office! If you haven’t checked out this option for Korean movies & dramas, you’re seriously missing out. They have uploaded a laundry list of dramas and movies to their roster and I, for one, am here for it. I started my binge session with the Korean movie Office. Here’s what Asian Wiki had to say about it:
Kim Byeong-Gook works as a section chief at a company. He is a family man and reliable with at his job, but, one day, he kills his entire family and disappears. Detective Jong-Hoon investigates the murder case and talks with his Kim Byeong-Gook’s co-workers at his office. His colleagues though are not very forthcoming with details. Besides, Lee Mi-Rye, who was very close with Kim Byeong-Gook, they seem to be hiding something. Detective Jong-Hoon checks the CCTV system and observes Kim Byeong-Gook returning to work after the murders, but he can’t locate when he left the office.
Meanwhile, the co-workers at the office become shaken with anxiety over Kim Byeong-Gook’s whereabouts.
Movie Review
Now here’s the thing. I was excited to watch this movie but after I did…I was left with lots of questions. So consider this your warning because there will probably be spoilers ahead.
The movie starts off with a bang. Byeong Gook comes home, has a lovely dinner, watches a bit of the boob tube and then attacks his family with a hammer. The thing I don’t like here is that he kills his son. It affected me. Not to the point of tears but enough for me to still be thinking about it days later.
Anyway, after he kills his family, he goes back to work. The police clearly see him entering the building but they can’t figure out where he is currently and there’s no footage of him leaving. Here was confusion point 1 for me: why didn’t the police search the building? They just went in there to talk to the employees and that was it.
Enter the employees! To make things short, all the employees are assholes. The only one I thought was bearable was the intern Mi-Rae. She was a timid little thing that tried too hard but had a good heart. The employees gave her so much
crap, I wanted to slap them. She is working hard to full-time time employee and everyone is doing what they can to make sure she doesn’t. When the police come to talk to the office to talk, her boss pulls her to the side and tells her to pretend that she doesn’t know Byeong Gook. I thought that was odd though because his desk was right next to hers. Of course,
she knew him. *sigh*
So the keystone cops just bumble around while Byeong Gook starts picking off his coworkers. The first person he got to, he hung his body in the drop ceiling. It was pretty graphic. While the coworkers are bitching at each other, trying to backstab each other to make sure they stay on the company’s good side, Mi-Rae the intern, is just trying to survive. She is trying to please everyone but is only just making them angry.
Mi-Rae is thinking that she’d be a shoo-in for the full-time position opening up until the company hires a new intern. Someone who is pretty, more educated and likable for her. She starts to snap. And while she’s starting to lose her marbles she starts thinking about the conversations she had with Byeong Gook. About how he stays calm by stroking a knife. Somewhere along the way she starts doing the same.
Here’s when things get interesting. A coworker is in the bathroom freshening up and gets murdered. Harshly. The viewers (me) think its Byeong Gook but surprise surprise, it’s Mirae. The girl has totally flipped her lid and starts killing everyone. The kicker is, she gets away with it. I won’t go into too much spoiler detail but it’s crazy. You see Mirae weeks later, getting ready to get on the subway, on her phone. Then the screen fades to black.
So. Many. Questions. What happened to Byeong Gook? When does he stop killing and MiRae start? Why did he kill his family? Why are the police freaking idiots?
Overall it’s a good movie to waste 2 hours on. I mean to say while it was a good watch, I probably won’t watch it again. So what did you think? Have you seen the movie yet? What do you think the explanation was on Byeong Gook? Let me know in the comment section below.
8 Comments
byeong guk was found dead in that room remember? the cops partner and the engineer guy went and smelled a rotting smell, and when the partner calls the cop, he says its the body of byeong guk.
most likely, he didnt kill anyone after killing his family. He went back to work afterwards and im guessing he killed himself (there was a bottle of something next to his dead body, so im guessing he poisoned himself). All the deaths were committed by mi rae. Remember when mi rae was sleeping in the conference room, and that girl looked back and saw that the ceiling panel was open? and then jae il was found there hanging. Also, when that girl was stabbed in the bathroom, she was hallucinating that it was byeong guk, but it was revealed to be mi rae.
Okay, that makes sense. I just wish that they put that more in the storyline. Also yes I kind of figured Mi Rae was the killer when she started flipping out over the simple things, though I probably would be upset with my coworkers too if they treated me that way. Definitely wouldn’t hurt anyone though, lol.
I do remember that! I was curious as to how he died. Did he kill himself? Did Mi Rae? They didn’t really go into detail about that and I felt that that was a pretty big piece of storyline to leave out.
If conclusion is not clear for a movie then its totally waste of watching it. I couldnt understand what happened to him & why he killed his own family & serial killing of employees. Nothing was clear. I wont prefer to watch this movie.
The story left us to think ourself and not spoonfed everything. But anyway actually the plot is pretty straight forward. Everything in the movie is Mi-Rae doing, Byeong Gook commited suicide after he killed his family by taking pills. It was shown towards the end, we jusy have to put the puzzle together. Having had some character explained word by word to us will make the twist less impactful.
There’s a theory on a reddit thread that the knife in question is possessed and passes hands when the deed is one. Although I’d like to believe otherwise, the knife aspect does make sense. Byeong Gook received it before the original owner committed suicide. On that fateful day, he gets fired which causes him to snap. He goes home, murders his family, heads back to the office and then commits suicide by consuming cyanide. But since he has to pass the knife onto someone, he may have given it to Mi Rae the same night. But this would imply that a somewhat considerable amount of time has passed after his death. Because in one scene where the detective breaks into Mi Rae’s house, he hears a story from the neighbor who once when she was drunk, entered Mi Rae’s house by mistake and got scared after seeing her hold the knife as if in a trance. This would have happened after she is in the same store drinking coffee as Byeong Gook, bumps into someone on the way out and we are shown that she has the knife wrapped in paper. As for his colleagues imagining it was Byeong Gook who is after them, it’s because right off the bat, they believe he is the killer because he’s missing after the fact and the cops haven’t caught him yet. The work stress combined with the fact that they never treated him well because of his assumed asocial behavior only adds up.
Back to the knife theory, when it changed hands, I am curious as to how Mi Rae managed to kill Jung Jae il since the only reason he was discovered is because the false ceiling gave way but not before blood started to drop on one employee. She’d require a considerable amount of strength to not just strangle the guy but pull him up and hide him there. Apart from the one guy who gets shot, every other person seems to have verbally abused Mi Rae at some point. The reason why the new intern gets away is because she’s never shown to be mean to Mi Rae. Back to Jung Jae il, I’m also curious as to why Mi Rae, assuming she killed him, stopped for a while. From what is shown, she’s already hallucinating about her colleagues bad mouthing her but she does not snap until she reads a letter stating that the new intern is set to become a permanent employee (this is after the HR guy assured her that there’s no way they’d let a newbie be given a full-time position so soon). This happens on the same day one of them quits due to the pressure. At first I thought the new intern getting the job was because the old one quit, but then you see the immediate boss talk to someone on the phone about how he wants an experienced worker since he fired the last one whom he considers as clueless.
The movie leaves more questions than answers and it’s probably best to make up your own theories as to why something happens. The ending is ambiguous as well because, again going by the knife theory, at that point, due to the knife being involved in serial murders, would still be in the hands of the police as evidence. Which means, Mi Rae is alive because she doesn’t have it in her possession so as to pass it onto someone else before killing herself. It could also be that, now that she’s away from the knife, she’s recovering and applied for a new job. But the look on the detective’s face after he walks out of Mi Rae’s room in the hospital makes me think he suspects her. It could be that what she said about the knife was already mentioned by Byeong Gook in his diary. But he can’t do anything because he killed the only guy who could have proved who the real killer was. There’s a phone conversation with his chief at the hospital who asks the detective if the guy he shot had any history of mental illness. Since the detective shot him in the head, without any specific evidence it’d be deemed as “excessive force” which would only land him and the department in trouble. So he may have made something up and this is why Mi Rae is free. Do remember that he got a promotion so that could have been part of the deal, he solved a serial murder, killed the culprit, saved a victim.
I don’t believe the knife was possessed, although it was the trigger of a dark chapter for both fo them. In real life is actually people like them that are really quiet, get bullied, too much stress that snap just like that. I also think that he read on the diary the words of Byeong Goo about the knife.