Lies Hidden in My Garden (2023)

Lies, deceit, murder and two broken women on a mission.

I may spend 360 days out of an year complaining about draggy dramas that are slow paced and bore me to death but when the weather hits just right and the sun goes down and I am in a certain type of mood, I spend the remaining five days seeking slow burn, dark, art house kind of movies and shows that feed my soul.

The thing with dramas like this is though that they bank heavily on two things: atmosphere and characters. It’s less about what is happening and more on why it is and the psyche behind it. If done well, they can give you a delicious little mental workout while thoroughly creeping you out.

“Lies hidden in my garden” absolutely nails the atmosphere. It delivers on the eeriness, the creep under your skin kind of horror and creates a perfectly unsettling and disturbing mood.

I absolutely love the camera work in this show. Some of the shots are truly stunning cause of how beautifully they overstate or understate events in the drama.

My particular favourite is when a character has this great revelation and the camera takes a 180 degree tilt and it’s almost like you can feel the character’s world turning on its axis.

So absolutely gorgeous cinematography coupled with a decent music score that highlights the underlying tension of the show.

Now, come the characters. I don’t know what it says about me that my choice for the best and most dynamic character in The Glory was Lim Ji yeon’s bully. ? I thought she slayed the role and so, it’s no secret that I picked this show up for her.

Her character here, is again not a very likeable one. She is an extremely broken woman, a victim of domestic violence, pregnant, broke with a sick mother and a burdensome brother to deal with, who is as greedy as she is volatile and as helpless as she is tragic.

LJY steals the spotlight as she flits over her various emotions and I think she delivered the complexities of her character fairly well.

The other most promising character is of the husband- the chilling, absolutely terrifying motherfucker who gaslights and lies as a passion. The actor killed the role and proved to be a very promising villain.

Now, here comes the elephant in the room- Kim Tae Hee and her character with an awful lotta screen time. KTH is a talentless and weak actress who has built a career on face value and it shows. My words are harsh but they are true. She is very uninteresting to watch on screen and gives life to a character that’s inconsistent and hard to empathise with because of how dumb she is.

Just because of her existence, the show loses its edge and brings down its standard.

Other than that, the writing of the show is nothing to sing home about. While the suspense element is done pretty well, the twists are hardly things you can’t see coming. Moreover, some plot lines/characters are introduced only to never be properly explored, making scenes with them just pointless and leading nowhere.

It’s like you understand what the writer wanted to achieve but they didn’t do a very good job doing it.

So, overall It’s an okay-ish show that you can enjoy only when you are in a certain mood. Good thing that it caught me at the right time so I did enjoy it but in good conscience cannot praise it for the quality.

Honestly, I think shows like Anna and movies like Burning and Voice of silence are better alternatives for this show. They’ll give you the same mood and take up less time.

So that’s that.

Enjoy!

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High expectations, but it was a letdown........

The trailer seems promising, but this drama's got some loopholes and it was a letdown. The suspense wasn't there, and it wasn't thrilling. I got bored after watching ep 3 onwards. There were a lot of boring dialogue and fillers. The drama could have been better if the script was better. I didn't understand why the need for the neighbor's character when she didn't do anything major in the drama, or no major explanation for the high school girl that got murdered. Or what's with the husband and his relationship with the high school girl. Also, no explanation for why the sister's dead. Like did she get killed or was she died by suicide? There were so many missing things and loopholes. It was disappointing.

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