Dr Brain: streaming series starring Parasite’s Lee Sun Kyun is a mind-melding cyberpunk sci-fi noir

Nov 4, 2021

Apple TV+ launches in South Korea in mind-melding fashion with Dr Brain, the debut drama series of filmmaker Kim Jee-woon. Kim brings his visual flair to bear on this six-episode webtoon adaptation that merges sci-fi, horror and mystery components into a cyberpunk noir odyssey.

Parasite actor Lee Sun-kyun leads the series as Dr Koh Sewon, an autistic brain scientist with a traumatic backstory. The series opens with Sewon causing a disturbance at his school as a child, an episode that further compounds his single mother’s woes at raising a son on the spectrum. One day his dazed mother steps into a truck’s path, but the sight of her annihilation does little to faze the unusual boy.

Under the care of a kindly brain researcher, played in a cameo by Moon Sung-keun, the orphaned Sewon becomes a dry but more-or-less stable adult, living with Jung Jaeyi (Lee Yoo-young) and their son Do-yoon, who is also autistic. Tragedy strikes again when Do-yoon perishes in a mysterious explosion, and Jaeyi descends into paranoia, refusing to acknowledge her son’s death before eventually slipping into a coma.

Rather than succumb to trauma, the taciturn Sewon doubles down on his research, which involves the study of “brainwave synchronisation”. In layman’s terms, this involves tapping into another person’s brainwaves to get a front-row seat to their feelings and memories.

His experiments on rats keep failing, until one day he hooks up a live rat to a perished one. From there, this modern-day Victor Frankenstein quickly escalates to experimenting on fresh corpses in the morgue, with the jovial Hong Namil (Lee Jae-won) serving as his Igor after another researcher shuts down his request to skip the lengthy protocols necessary to pursue official trials.

While this sounds straightforward, up until this point – roughly halfway through the premiere episode – Dr Brain is weighed down by exposition and a self-serious tone that doesn’t initially do it many favours.

This is most acutely felt during a scene in which Sewon mutters his findings to a panel of researchers at a conference. Lee Sun-kyun’s toneless delivery is a manifestation of his autism, but as our first introduction to the adult Sewon, this info dump is heavy going.

Tags: #Lee Sun Kyun; #Dr.Brain; #Parasite;
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