Voice

Voice

6/10

Voice

Genre:                                  Episodes: 16                           Year: 2017

Mystery

Thriller

Synopsis:

Moo Jin Hyuk is a detective who has cracked many major cases, but after the brutal murder of his wife, his life starts to fall apart. The suspect for his wife’s murder is released after an emergency-call worker, Kang Kwon Joo, claims she has supersensitive hearing, and that the suspect’s voice wasn’t the one she heard during Jin Hyuk’s wife’s emergency call. Three years later, Kwon Joo creates a Golden Time Team in the police force, and works with Jin Hyuk to rescue victims in the crime’s ‘golden time’ period, and also search for the true murderer from three years ago.

Cast:

Jang Hyuk (Moo Jin Hyuk)

Lee Ha Na (Kang Kwon Joo)

Kim Jae Wook (Mo Tae Goo)

Baek Sung Hyun (Shim Dae Shik)

Lee Hae Young (Jang Kyung Hak)

Yesung (Oh Hyun Ho)

Son Eun Seo (Park Eun Seo)

Lee Do Kyung (Mo Ki Beom)

General Thoughts:

2017 better start stepping up it’s game because so far there hasn’t been a single drama that I’ve really liked from start to finish. Sigh. ‘Voice’ was okay as far K-Dramas go, but I will admit that I didn’t really have a lot of affection for any of the characters. They were set up nicely, but never actually developed beyond their character profiles which was a shame.

Who even are you?

The side characters didn’t really come into play and weren’t relevant to the plot at all. Hyun Ho and Eun Soo barely got any screen time at all, and despite being set up as a cute couple-in-the-making, the show didn’t spend any time focusing on the way their relationship developed. Or the way any relationships developed. I wasn’t totally sold on the acting either.

He always seemed a touch drunk

This was the first drama I’ve seen with Jang Hyuk, and I’m sad to say that his style of acting just isn’t my favourite. While I wouldn’t say he’s a bad actor, I didn’t find him super convincing, and he never made Jin Hyuk a likeable character for me- it felt like he was staying securely in his little character profile box. I was more impressed by Lee Ha Na in this than I was by her in ‘High School King of Savvy’, but in saying that I don’t think the role here was particularly difficult. She did a great job in pretending she could hear things others couldn’t, but apart from the one scene of her listening to her father get murdered (which she did act excellently), Kwon Joo was a fairly static, robotic character. The side characters barely even get enough screen time to display their acting skills at all. I was keen to see how Yesung would go, but sadly we didn’t get to see much of him do anything. On a positive note, Kim Jae Wook’s acting was just superb. The mystery-thriller aspects of the drama were really cool, and it had a bit of an ‘NCIS’ or ‘Law & Order’ vibe about it, which are both shows I’ve really enjoyed. The individual cases always felt interesting and different, even if one or two did feel a bit like filler.

I like Jin Hyuk best when he's saving people and not arguing

By focusing so heavily on these cases, I sort of started to forget that I didn’t really care about any of the characters because in those scenes they were heroes off to rescue abused victims- and that itself is enough to make you cheer for their success. The show wasn’t afraid to go to some darker places, particularly with the main villain, so that added a large amount of tension into the series too.

Such suspense, much wow

The characters always felt as if they were in some kind of danger, and I honestly believed that one of the leads might actually get killed off at some point- and that’s a rare edge for a drama to have because it’s usually so obvious that all the main characters will make it out safe and happy. The show was shot beautifully, and really capitalised on lighting and camera angles to heighten its suspense. The soundtrack was also really solid and did an excellent job at complementing the scenes, whether they were sad, creepy, or suspenseful. My only production gripe is that there were times when the camera wasn’t still. And that doesn’t make me feel more anxious for our characters at all. It just makes me want to tell the camera director to sober the f*ck up. But apart from that, the editing and production was swell. The story was a bit of a weird one, in that I still felt the excitement and the suspense, but there was just something about the series that kept me at a distance. I never felt fully involved in the characters’ lives like a giant invisible stalker the way I usually do- it felt very much like the only parts of their lives we saw were the aspects that involved the murderer. And while that’s interesting and all, I kind of wanted there to be more to the characters (and by extension the plot) than that.

What Was Great:

Villain:

Kim Jae Wook was the shining beacon of hope for this series. Which is ironic considering he was the psychotic murderer. Surprisingly, of all the characters Tae Goo seemed to have the most depth. He was just endlessly fascinating. I wanted to know how he became a murderer, why he murdered people, how he chose his victims, and of course I wanted to see him eventually brought to justice.

He was weirdly alluring in a totally terrifying way

I think on paper he was your average rich chaebol with an unbalanced mind and murderous tendencies, but Kim Jae Wook made him much more than that. He was oddly alluring and just dripping with charisma, so you’d almost fall for him until he’d do something crazy like bathe in someone’s blood. While he felt psychotic, he also came across as more than just your average ‘psycho’ who has nothing but a mental illness to excuse their behaviour. As well as Kim Jae Wook’s performance, I did like the story-progression of Tae Goo as a character and how they explored his psychotic nature.

'Killer' cheekbones (hur hur)

Every new behaviour of Tae Goo’s added an extra layer of creepy (killing people, literal blood baths, keeping victims' hair, sending their hair to his next victim), and it was fascinating the more his history was unravelled. Rather than just having Tae Goo be a regular crazy chaebol with a father who covered up his murders, I liked that this drama took the stance that it was because his father covered up his murders that he became even more psychotic. It added a nice twist to a story that we’ve heard several times, and even seemed to make Tae Goo that much more of a villain. Because he didn’t even need to become a villain, it was just his father’s pride and greed (and general disregard for other people) that gave Tae Goo the foundation he needed to become the worst murderer of the decade. On a side note, I’m not that thrilled with how Tae Goo’s demise played out. It was all going well right up to when he got arrested and Jin Hyuk didn’t kill him the way he was expecting, but his death afterwards was just weird. It was hard to tell if it was an imaginary sequence from Tae Goo’s broken mind (as it was shot in black and white) or some weird sort of set up for a season 2 (with the doctor being the new murderer).

What madness is this?

Overall, I much preferred the ending being one of psychological torture for Tae Goo rather than Tae Goo himself getting murdered. It was much more interesting and satisfying to think of this mass murder being in constant torment for not being able to kill people anymore rather than just being dead himself. Oh well, he was still a fab villain.

What Wasn’t:

Censorship:

I knooooow that this is technically the station’s fault but it still bugged me. Like why on earth would you air a mystery-thriller if you were going to sensor half of it anyway? I’m not against a bit of gore in my dramas so I really enjoyed the dark vibe of ‘Voice’, but nothing makes a killer seem less creepy than blurring out his atrocities.

Olive? Eye? Thanks to censorship we might never know

I’ve seen censorship in other dramas, like a blurred knife or blurred blood, and just had a giggle and moved on, but here it severely impacted the enjoyment of the show. There were times I couldn’t quite understand what our characters were talking about because I couldn’t see it myself, most notably being Tae Goo spooning out one of his victim's eyes and leaving them like olives in a martini for detectives to find. It took me a little while to piece together what it was because behind all that blurring, all I could really see was a glass. I assumed it was an eye only because the police mentioned ‘body parts’ and you can’t exactly put a foot on a toothpick and chuck it in a glass. It’s not exactly thrilling to have everything the killer does in the series blurred out. It just seemed so very stupid. If you don’t want to watch gore then maybe don’t watch a drama about a dude who bludgeons people to death with a metal ball. Just sayin’. 

No Character Development:

By far the biggest weakness of the story was how little development any of the characters got. If you compare your knowledge of the characters in the first episode to the last, not a lot changes. And that’s not a good thing.

I so wanted to watch you get together. Why didn't you?

Jin Hyuk is an impulsive, angry jerk at the start and he’s an angry, impulsive jerk at the end. Kwon Joo is desperate to catch her father's killer at the start and that’s all we see her do all series long. Outside of wanting to catch Tae Goo, I really had no idea of who these characters were as people. Even their thoughts on their loved one’s deaths were pretty one-dimensional.

I think this is the most perfect nose I have ever seen

Tae Goo killed them so they want to catch him. The drama never explores our characters’ feelings of guilt or loneliness much. There were a few scenes slipped in now and then, but not enough to shape them as characters. Dae Shik got a nice bit of development at the end there (which is just as well or it would have been such a waste of Baek Sung Hyun), but again, it wasn’t quite enough to make me care about the relationships between the characters. Sure, I’d prefer if Dae Shik and Jin Hyuk remained friends, but I’m not really fussed either way. By not giving the characters any development, they always felt very one-dimensional. They felt like characters rather than people, and while we know that that’s what they are, it does stop you from connecting to the characters on an emotional level- because they don’t feel real. In the final episode when Dae Shik was in danger I did get a bit distracted wondering if they were going to alter Baek Sung Hyun’s perfect nose after so many kettle-bell shots to the face, which kind of demonstrates the level of engagement I had with the characters. It’s a bummer really, because the drama would have been so much more compelling if the characters had some depth and got me attached.

Recommend?

I’d recommend purely for Kim Jae Wook’s performance, which was amazing. While the thriller aspects were pretty cool, I don’t think ‘Voice’ is in a class of its own. I wouldn’t rush out to tell you to watch it, but I wouldn’t rush out to tell you not to either.

One of the craziest crazies in K-Dramaland