Sweet Home 2: hit Netflix monster show with Song Kang loses its way

Sweet Home: monster fun in Netflix’s hokey Korean horror show

Equally memorable were its colourful, gooey and bizarre monsters, several of which were vividly brought to life through practical special effects.

Sweet Home has returned, and the Green Home survivors have been pushed out into the open with dozens of nondescript new characters. This time they face off against hordes of ugly digital rock monsters that look like background AI replications of each other.

Following directly on from the events of season 1, Sweet Home 2 begins with Cha Hyun-su (Song Kang) in custody and being transported to an army base to be experimented on.

On the way there he breaks free with the help of Pyeon Sang-wook (Lee Jin-wook). Sang-wook died in the previous season, but his body was taken over by a malevolent monster, who, like Hyun-su, can consciously control his monster powers. Despite escaping, they head to the base anyway.

The other survivors, among them Lee Eun-yu (Go Min-si) and Yoon Ji-su (Park Gyu-young), are taken to a refugee camp where they deal with trigger-happy soldiers. They are saved by Park Chan-young (Jung Jin-young), a soldier with a conscience, and together they go to a new camp at a baseball stadium.

Other new characters include the members of the gutsy Crow Platoon, led by the square-jawed Tak In-hwan (Yu Oh-seong), whose vocal second-in-command, Kim Young-hoo (Kim Mu-yeol), feels that his superior’s actions expose the platoon to unnecessary danger.

Meanwhile, the pregnant Seo Yi-kyung (Lee Si-young) is also heading to the army base, where she hopes to locate her fiancé.

Despite being a high-octane, big-budget series, one of Sweet Home’s chief strengths was its compact locations. The pressure-cooker environment they engendered delivered great drama between the entrapped characters, and the confined space was a recipe for claustrophobic and tense set pieces.

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Beyond enticing themes and thrilling technique, Sweet Home’s location also helped mask the weakness of its concept. We were gripped by the idea of humans turning into monsters based on their personal struggles and marvelled at the design of the creatures, but the less we knew about the sketchy mythology of this world, the better.

Out in the dystopian chaos of the open world, the mythology no longer makes sense. The more the show tries to explain itself – often through the ramblings of mad scientist Dr Lim (Oh Jung-se) – the more confusing it gets, and the message of people being subsumed by their inner monsters is lost.

Sweet Home 2 jumps right into major set pieces, but these are dominated by stodgy digital effects during car chases through a post-apocalyptic Seoul.

Digital blur aside, the first few episodes are not without their charms. But once the story resets following a time gap that occurs after episode three, things quickly start to go downhill.

A huge number of new characters suddenly appear in episode four, none of them interesting, several of them grating. The remaining original characters are lost in the mix as they shuffle through their threadbare narratives.

The show takes us deeper into its confusing mythology without giving us solid narrative threads to latch onto. It’s seldom clear where we’re going or why, and the overarching question that soon crystallises in our minds is: “Why bother?”

While these episodes are billed as season 2, strictly speaking they are only the first part. Sweet Home 3, already shot and currently in post-production, will follow in summer 2024.

Sweet Home season 2 is streaming on Netflix.