Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Dead End Job Directors: Kim Da-min, Han Jun-hee | Writers: Kyung Min-sun, Lee Shin-ji
Byeon Hyeok-joon (Lee Jae-wook) is broke, unemployed, and has lost all the money his mother lent him to stocks and scams. With loan sharks now after his skin, he think his best option is to jump off a bridge, but gets cold feet at the last moment. Instead, he spots a suspiciously placed job advertisement offering people a chance to turn their lives around. Of course he takes the bait.
Spanning eight episodes, the Korean series Dead End Job is a horror-thriller that follows Hyeok-joon as he takes up strange gigs through Spider Staffing Agency, a shady little firm run by the mysterious Mr. S (Lee Hee-joon), someone with a very ‘cult leader’ personality. The agency offers jobs paying at least 50 times the average hourly wage, mostly because the work is quite literally hell. The rules are simple: survive the shift, don’t tell anybody about it, or face a hefty fine. Because these jobs involve all sorts of supernatural mayhem, complete with creepy ghosts and monsters.
Thematically, Dead End Job hits all the right spots. It takes darkly comical jabs at hustle culture, get-rich-quick schemes, and the exhausting realities of an unforgiving job market that pushes people to take up whatever work comes their way, just to make ends meet. Although, of course, Hyeok-joon isn’t exactly the quintessential worker bee trapped in a crushing cycle of inherited debt, but rather a young man who squandered his mother’s hard-earned money in a bid to make a quick buck.
Titled ‘Convenience Store Rules’, the first episode of ‘Dead End Job’ sees Hyeok-joon take up a night shift at a strange store with almost no customers and a fellow part-timer (Choi Hyun-wook, in a small cameo) with an equally strange sense of humour. Pretty soon, Hyeok-joon realizes why these jobs pay 50 or even 200 times the usual wage: they’re anything but ordinary. Drawing on his childhood determination to finish whatever he starts, like clearing difficult video-game levels, Hyeok-joon soldiers through an eerie night, only to emerge ready to throw in the towel. But when Mr. S offers him another gig with an even more tempting paycheck, the young man takes it up, supernatural stakes can be conquered after all.
And so each chapter of ‘Dead End Job’ follows Hyeok-joon through another dangerous gig, where he’s almost always on the brink of death, with the bruises to prove that his horrifying experiences are real and not hallucinations. When one of these jobs goes horribly wrong, he sends a text to his younger sister Ji-Yoon (Kim Min-ha), who ends up getting dragged into the strange business of Spider Staffing Agency herself. To add some family drama and complexity to the tale, the writers also throw in a twist involving the siblings’ MIA father, whose disappearance appears to have a connection to the same agency.
Another major subplot focuses on a young woman named Yeon-joo (Go Min-si), a labour accident investigator who begins tailing Hyeok-joon while trying to dig up more information about Spider Staffing Agency. Her solo-investigator act certainly smells fishy, but it also offers a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak tale of young workers being exploited. At least someone out there seems to be looking out for their rights. Luckily, Hyeok-joon also has his little sister looking out for him and their sibling relationship is a fun ingredient.
Driving insufferable clients, delivering milk in a bizarre building bursting with negative energy, or participating in a clinical trial that demands much more than the proverbial pound of flesh sought by Shakespeare’s Shylock, Hyeok-joon keeps taking up nightmarish gigs, initially for money and later for a more personal agenda. He does try to land a regular corporate job at one point, only to hilariously find himself at an interview that’s clearly another scam. If one must get philosophical, Dead End Job is a satire on jobs straight from hell: the ones that pay shit pile on the misery, while those offering fatter cheques extract your soul in return.
Lee Jae-wook gives his all as the floundering Byeon Hyeok-joon, a young man with no real aspirations, talents, or dreams. His tenacity and sheer will to survive are his only discernible personality traits. Which is perhaps why his younger sister, Ji-Yoon, emerges as the more entertaining character in the second half of ‘Dead End Job‘. She’s feisty, fearless, loves to shop and eat, is a former athlete and is desperately trying to land herself a job, while playing video games. See, there’s so much to write about her and so little about her brother. But then again, the poor guy wanted to jump off a bridge and didn’t have much to live for in the first place.
And that brings me to my biggest grouse with Dead End Job: it promises an unhinged supernatural descent into bloody chaos, yet so much of the actual carnage is merely implied rather than shown. An odd creative choice for a show with a TV-MA rating that’s clearly not meant for children. Sure, the climactic episode finally unleashes some brutal killings, but by then, it feels like too little, too late. Worse, the carnage is undermined by an emotionally convenient resolution to a deadly, potentially world-ending problem. Of course, there’s one final ironic twist that leaves the door open for a second season.
Overall, despite its frustrating pacing, underwhelming horror, and not particularly satisfying ending, Dead End Job remains a whimsical, weird ride. Its ever-changing assortment of hellish jobs and occasional flashes of absurd entertainment offer just enough novelty to keep viewers hooked until the final episode. It’s a show with plenty of imagination, even if it doesn’t always have the courage to go as far as its premise promises.
Rating: 6 on 10. Watch ‘Dead End Job’ on Netflix.
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