Review of Mask Girl / 마스크걸

For the longest time I’ve been telling myself that I want to watch a Korean drama with Nana in it, and let me tell you, when I ended up pressing play on Mask Girl, I had no idea she was in it.

I watched this show on a whim, as I had not heard of it before it had dropped on Netflix, and then when I read the synopsis one night after getting really bored with reality I decided to watch it.

The plot seemed really wacky and up my alley, which is honestly why I decided to give it the green light despite having a million other things I wanted to watch as well.

So I pressed play, and I was blown away with what I was watching throughout these episodes. My first thought I’ll introduce in this post is that Mask Girl comes across as pure Korean cinema at times.

It’s something that goes off the deep end pretty quickly, and is reminiscent of the content we’d be seeing coming out in the early to late 2000s. And for those new to my blog and film criticism work: I love this kind of filmmaking outside of its glaring problems.

Anyways, let’s get into this review, shall we?

An office worker who’s insecure about her appearance gets involved in murder and a series of wild events.

Our main character in Mask Girl is Kim Mo-mi, who is unremarkable in the looks department (according to the show). She grows up wanting to become an idol or singer, but because she doesn’t have the looks, everyone keeps making fun of her.

Mo-mi ends up with a serious insecurity about her looks, and now, even as an office worker who doesn’t have the most exciting job, she finds her world starting to be upended yet again when a prettier female coworker shows up and is tight with the boss that Mo-mi has a crush on. In her free time, she stars as an online persona known as Mask Girl, building up a massive following online.

One of her biggest fans is a fellow male coworker who has realized her identity, and he silently has a crush on her at work and knows that Mo-mi likes their boss.

When the female coworker deemed more pretty is caught having a fling with the boss, it ruins both of their careers, and the male coworker decides he’s going to make his move on Mo-mi.

She gets herself banned on the online forum because she ends up showing things she really shouldn’t have, and the male coworker ends up getting her into a hotel room under the guise of concern. She gets plastic surgery in the mean time.

He ends up raping her in an really awful scene, one that’s honestly pretty difficult to watch, and then she kills him.

The male coworker’s mother puts together the pieces, something the cops themselves are unable to do, and she decides on her own to hunt down this vicious Mask Girl who murdered her beloved son.

She kidnaps a woman after stalking several nightclubs, but Kim Chun-ae isn’t Mo-mi. She claims to be her rival, but, as it turns out, she’s besties with Mo-mi. Mo-mi helped her escape their terrible ex.

Together, Mo-mi and Chun-ae confront the mother, Kyung-jae, but it ends up with Chun-ae dying of a gunshot wound, a pregnant Mo-mi dumping both the bodies of Kyung-jae and Chun-ae into a car and sinking it in the lake. She is sent to prison not long after that, but Kyung-jae survives.

A time jump happens, and Mo-mi’s daughter is raised by her grandmother. When everyone at school realizes she’s Mask Girl’s daughter, it ruins her life, and she blames her former best friend for it.

But as it turns out, it’s Kyung-jae striking again in order to make this girl miserable and get her revenge.

Kyung-jae ends up kidnapping the trouble daughter eventually after spreading all of these rumors and ruining the girl’s life, Mo-mi busts herself out of prison, the grandma and former best friend make some moves in order to get to the girl, and then there’s an epic finale where almost everyone except the daughter and her best friend end up dead.

Overall Thoughts

Like I wrote before, I think this show is absolutely wild and definitely in the category of movies in Korean cinema that came out during a specific period.

There are a ton of critiques about beauty and society packed into this brief series that would be pretty fun to analyze somewhere later down the road, but I found the more feminist focus of this show to be fascinating—that’s what we didn’t get in the 2000s.

This is a story focusing on women who’ve been wronged by society and men, and we don’t often get these kinds of shows coming out of Korea. Please give me more feminist rage!

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