“Penthouse: War in Life” (펜트하우스)

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
January 6, 2021

☆☆☆☆
Shim Su-Ryeon (played by Lee Ji-Ah)
Oh Yoon-Hee (played by Eugene)
Cheon Seo-Jin (played by Kim So-Yeon)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

As I said in my Teen Vogue article, “Penthouse” starts off with the most makjang (or exaggerated) storyline of the year. As a very rich woman takes the elevator down from her 100th floor penthouse apartment, she witnesses a young girl falling, surely to her death. The teenager lands in the arms of a statue. This deliciously gripping female-centric series revolves around rival classical singers and includes a (dun dun dun!) switched-at-birth plot twist. Did I mention that one of male characters has a torture chamber in his home, because, why not? Mixed in with the outrageous content is a parable about the haves and the have nots.

Unlike many Korean dramas which are one-and-done, seasonwise, “Penthouse” is scheduled to have three seasons, with the second season up and running sometime later this year. So the season finale last night was left open ended as to who survives. And judging by all the duplicitous backstabbing and allegiance switching, I am predicting that the horrifying death of a main character was a got ya to make the guilty feel smugly safe. I am predicting that the character will return next season alive and well, rather than as a flashback.

With all that said, I really wish all the clever manipulators would stop telling their prey what they were going to do next, giving the latter time to circumvent everything.

The three central characters are Su-Ryeon, who’s married to the wealthy and immoral Dan-Tae; Seo-Jin, an ice queen who takes far too much pride in having won a high school trophy (lmao what?); and Yoon-Hee, the downtrodden woman whose life was ruined when Seo-Jin’s cheating deprived her of the aforementioned trophy. Seo-Jin and Su-Ryeon live in Seoul’s most gaudily tall apartment complex called Hera Palace. They are surrounded by a group of unctuous hangers on who are wealthy, but not wealthy enough to live in the penthouse like Su-Ryeon and Dan-Tae.

Not surprisingly, the spawn of the Hera Palace residents are entitled bullies whose parents have used their wealth and power to get them out of trouble. The parents don’t care that their children kidnapped and set afire a bus where they locked in a classmate. They just care about other people hearing about it.

I’m going to share some of the spoilers later, but here are a few tidbits before that:

• Seo-Jin won the trophy as a teenager by having a rich father who manipulated the results of a singing contest. Otherwise, Yoon-Hee would’ve won. Yoon-Hee is bitter about this, because she blames her life on not having won what was rightfully hers. But she still would’ve been poor and from a family with no connections. That alone would’ve kept her from rising to the top. Also, I don’t get it. What makes a trophy for high schoolers that valuable? If it was a college award or some kind of international trophy, I could see there being more prestige and value. She didn’t go on to become a world renowned classical singer, but rather works for her father, who’s the head of an elite high school that’s famous for getting its students into Seoul National University. That’s what her trophy got her? A glorified management position at her dad’s school. Granted, it’s a prestigious high school, but … so? It’s still a high school. And she starts off as such an independent woman, but then goes bonkers when the man she’s seeing on the side shows interest in other women. I mean…

• Su-Ryeon is the most interesting character and I loved, Loved, LOVED her to pieces. She was so calm and dignified, even as she wreaked havoc on those who deserved it. Her husband, Dan-Tae, is a pill. He is abusive to their children (she’s their stepmother and raised them from their infancy). She develops a plan to get back at him and it’s a doozy. She’s always one step ahead of him … until she’s not. As the husband, Um Ki-Joon is so good in his role. He has one of the most punchable faces in K-Dramas (see “Phantom“) and is so good at playing smarmy men. He’s also delightful playing sympathetic characters, as he does in “Dream High.”

• I hate it that a character who has been horrible for much of the series — bullying classmates and hurting peers just because he can — is given a sympathetic lens later in the series. Su-Ryeon’s stepchildren Seok-Hoon (Kim Young-Dae) and Seok-Kyung (Han Ji-Hyun) are manipulative, spoiled shitheads. But because Seok-Hoon takes a liking to the school outcast Ro-Na (Kim Hyun-Soo) — Yoon-Hee’s daughter — viewers are supposed to forgive him. That’s a hard no for me. Yes, the actor is good looking. Yes, he was raised by a horrible father. But he was old enough to not do the things that he did. And being nice to one girl doesn’t make his past actions forgivable.

• Speaking of which, Su-Ryeon isn’t 100% clean, either. She raised the children from the time they were infants. (Their biological mom — Dan-Tae’s first wife — died shortly after giving birth.) Yet she wasn’t aware of the bruises on the twins’ bodies and didn’t prevent them from being abused by their father? When children turn out that horrible, both parents played some part in it. Even if you didn’t beat the child, turning a blind eye is almost as bad.

Airdates: Twenty-one episodes aired on SBS from October 26, 2020 to January 5, 2021. You may also read my reviews of Season 2 and Season 3. 

Spoiler Alert: Anna Lee (Jo Soo-Min), the Korean American tutor that Seo-Jin hired for her daughter is a smart and savvy indigent girl who spent 10 years or so in a child-welfare center. She is actually Seol-Ah, the biological daughter of Su-Ryeon and her first husband, who was murdered by Dan-Tae. The shock of her husband’s death sent Su-Ryeon into premature labor. While she was recovering, Dan-Tae paid off a nurse to switch the chart information with another infant who was born on the same day. He told Seo-Jin that he would take care of her and the baby and raise the child like his own. In reality, he specifically chose the switched baby, because she was born sickly and he expected her to die soon enough. Su-Ryeon’s father had left valuable property to the baby, Hye-In (Na So-Ye), and Dan-Tae wanted to co-opt that land for himself.

Driven by jealousy that Su-Ryeon had married another man, Dan-Tae ordered his henchman to kill the baby that Su-Ryeon had given birth to. Unable to do it, the flunky dropped the baby off anonymously at an orphanage. But the caregiver there was corrupt. The owner basically sold the children to wealthy couples overseas who needed organs to help their biological children survive. After Anna donated an organ to their son, Logan, the adoptive parents fabricated a story that she had stolen from them and shipped her back to Korea.

Logan and Anna had a true brother-sister relationship. When he learned what had happened to her, he vowed to get revenge on those who killed her. He helps Su-Ryeon get vengeance on the Hera Palace residents, but I kept wondering: Why didn’t he seek revenge on his own parents? They are as responsible as Dan-Tae for Anna/Seoul-Ah’s tragic death.

For much of the series, we are led to believe that Seo-Jin or Dan-Tae killed Anna. But in Episode 18 (I think), Yoon-Hee remembers that while she witnessed Dan-Tae strangling Anna, she herself is the one who pushed Anna over the balcony. Why? Because if Anna died, Yoon-Hee’s daughter, Ro-Na, would be admitted into the fancy school that all the rich kids attend.

Yoon-Hee was problematic even before we learned she’s a murderer. Before she started an affair with Dan-Tae — but after she killed Su-Ryeon’s daughter, Anna — she and Su-Ryeon teamed up to take vengeance on Dan-Tae. With insider information provided by Su-Ryeon, Yoon-Hee had no problem screwing over an elderly man and woman, who were trying to save their home. All she thought about was reselling the property to investors, who wanted to build an extravagant mall in that spot.

In the Season 1 finale, Dan-Tae kills Su-Ryeon and sets up Yoon-Hee to take the fall. Once she’s being transferred to prison, Logan “rescues” her, with the intent to kill her. But she stabs herself in the neck — around the same area where Seo-Jin had stabbed her with that trophy in high school — and dies.

Oh, Seo-Jin is kinda/sorta reponsible for her father’s death. He was a hateful piece of work, but she is so extra. Wow. After he and Seo-Jin got into a heated argument outside in the rain (haha!), he collapsed. Instead of getting help for him, she let him die. Why? Because he was going to demote her and move her younger sister to the top position at the school. Mmmmmmm, I wasn’t sad about his death, to be honest.

Anyhow, did Su-Ryeon and Yoon-Hee really die? Su-Ryeon is the person who drew me into this series. I am hoping that her death is highly exaggerated and she cleverly faked her own death to punish Yoon-Hee for killing Anna. (I know — but work with me here…I’m just vamping at this point.) As for Yoon-Hee, it appeared she died. But again, her eyes were open and blinking. So, I think she’ll survive to come back in Season 2.

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