Right after The Double, I decided to watch this pretty hyped drama that’s been appearing on my social media feeds, taunting me to watch it. So, watched I did and… till now I wonder if I might have wasted my entire Sunday with it.

Let me explain…

The Frog, a limited series by Netflix, is about an elderly man named Jeon Young Ha (Kim Yoon Seok) who had a vacation rental in the woods (nice…). Think of it as Airbnb. It was doing well until a guest named Yu Sung Ah (Go Min Si) appeared seemingly innocently with her little son. It looked like a normal vacation until suddenly Sung Ah and the young boy disappeared. Young Ha thought they had left the vacation rental until he smelled something fishy (or you can say bloody) and the disappearance of the little boy and Sung Ah seemed to be suspicious but Young Ha decided to put it behind him and clean the place up. Until she came back to haunt him and his family the next year, looking even crazier than when they first met. At the same time, Yun Bo Min (Lee Jung Eun) moved to the area and recalled back her first case with a motel that became synonymous with a murder that happened there.

Firstly, let’s go with the positives… the acting. The acting by Go Min Si is superb. Girlie is crazily good at playing a psychopath. She really shows her versatility here with the roles that she had acted in so far from Youth of May, Sweet Home and now The Frog. Not to be pushed aside is Kim Yoon Seok. Once you see him on screen, you know this man is a veteran and nothing is not good when he’s in a show or movie.

And as it is with Netflix, the cinematography is that of a movie. The setting is in the woods – it can be both beautiful, scenic and peaceful as it is haunting and mysterious. And another thing noteworthy is that there’s no intro at all, which is refreshing. It just goes straight into the show without any introduction of what it could possibly be about. When you start watching, you just have to guess what The Frog even is, and why they even named the show The Frog (there’s a reason, guys).

On to the negatives… this can be much shorter. Honestly, it would have been fine with 4 or 5 episodes. It just seems so draggy. I get so mad when the solution is right there and Young Ha decided to take a whole wrong direction and the plot just went downhill from there. He should have just gone with his gut feel and we would not be dragged into 8 episodes. And his insistence to go and check on the past with the motel which has little to do with his current situation makes no sense because there is no linkage at all between the two places. Initially, I thought it was the same place as the motel but it was torn down and replaced with the vacation rental but it is not, which leads me to this…

It is confusing when there is no linkage between the motel with the serial killer of the past and the current vacation rental and it is frustrating how they try to link these two up. Why? With the exception of a murder that happened in the motel and the possible murder (obviously is) in the vacation rental, it has no connection at all. And when it went back and forth and the past is not very much in the past, it gets confusing for me to watch because I don’t know which year this is – the past or the present – it looks the same to me. Nowhere does it indicate where we are in and if not for the character of Koo Gi Ho (Chanyeol), I would be even more confused. It was so frustrating to watch that I sighed multiple times.

It deserves the 33% from Rotten Tomatoes.

Overall, I give it a 2 out of 5 – watch if you want your blood pressure to go up out of sheer frustration. It could have been a good one.