My Review On Sweet Home (2020) Netflix Original

sweet home is now on Netflix so here is my review I know it's stupid a mysterious illness breaks out causing people to turn into hideous creatures residents out of an apartment complex must work together and learn to survive I've been looking forward to this Netflix original series for several weeks now the trailer was really intriguing and  I love most of the stuff that comes from South Korea right off the bat though I've got to say that the series is inconsistent the special effects sometimes are really good and other times they're absolutely terrible

the tension and urgency because of the story concept should be non-stop but it vacillates a ton and it almost forgets that there's impending doom we get introduced to a lot of characters in the first two episodes and most of them in that first episode now we don't get all of their backgrounds just crammed into that first episode or even the first two it does build over time and so it makes these characters more robust as the episodes progress one thing I love about many of the South Korean shows and movies that I've seen is how well they're able to blend genres I mean they take a thriller or a horror and make it wildly emotional

they're able to take these characters and make me invested so much into them so that when something is on the line I'm right there like I'm just on baited breath to make sure that they are gonna their outcome is gonna be positive now this had some of those qualities but it did take me a while to become invested in a lot of the players in the very first episode

I was wondering if I had made a mistake in watching because the graphics and the effects are absolutely abysmal we are shown some creatures and they're cool and they have some really great qualities to them and how just the imagination that went into building these characters but then they're destroyed by terrible looking CGI and it's almost like it's a cut scene from a video game the texture the lighting all of that doesn't match the rest of the film and so it breaks you out of anything that you've been invested in and that fakeness that just that non-matching of the texture of lighting it doesn't feel seamless within the scenes that continues through a lot of the show and it does break me out almost every time because i get distracted by the quality of these graphics but then there are other times where they're using practical effects and not only for creatures but for also the blood and the gore there's a symptom of the infection that causes blood

I mean a lot of blood and it is disgusting and it is effective but the practical effects that they used in this side as well as some of the creatures that they build and they actually build them out it works really well I just wish they would have spent more time on the CGI so that you wouldn't have been broken out of the feeling or just out of the narrative when you see these pop on to the screen now I get it some of them because some of the creatures and what they have to do it will  be hard to do it with practical effects but i just wish that they would have made them seamless

i wish they would have just blended it better so that it matched the awesomeness in the other parts of the series a lot of the atmosphere works well too because this takes place in an apartment building and so you have a closed-off location and that causes claustrophobia but also a false sense of safety they use some really vivid colors a lot of the time and then other times they use it they enhance it really I guess with CGI and again that's not done very well but the location itself the atmosphere that is built because you have just this apartment building I enjoyed just the different facets that go within a building itself

I mean you have dislike I said a closed-off location you can go up and down and you can kind of go side to side a little bit but mostly you have just limited capacity of where you can travel and so it amps up the tension now I was really digging the soundtrack in this also I mean the music would become upbeat or driving as the scenes dictated and it worked really well but later on they begin to use the exact same song over and over again now I can imagine dragon songs and the song that they chose worked really well in this scene but then they used that song again and again

the repeated use of the song just became annoying and it became more of a distraction again like some of the bad cgi this show is based off a webtoon and while i haven't seen that i have seen some of the screenshots from it and this series does a pretty good job at recreating some of the elements and some of the creatures and atmospheres within that i wish the tension and urgency would have been more consistent throughout the entire narrative from what we understand there are creatures outside of this apartment building who are trying to get in and there are parts where this causes some good fun with chases and anxiety but then there's also parts and large parts even at that where the creatures are almost forgot tenso what that does is it reduces the danger of anything trying to get in it just kind of breaks that and it forgets about there's even a part where a breach happens and nobody seems concerned by this and that doesn't match the feel that had happened in other times when there was a breach or just even an opening and it did that in consistency began to weigh on me and i don't need this to be a non-stop action show either but because of how the story is crafted there shouldn't be a let down of the suspense but that's not what happened in this there was a letdown of the suspense because of that story and consistency

I didn't feel this tension this underlying urgency to protect oneself the entire way through I liked a lot of the cast I mean at least the way they were portrayed I didn't like all of the characters and some of them I absolutely hated but I became invested in them and the rewere some that I was really concerned for their safety and for their well-being and I was rooting for them and I'm really glad that they were able to put in some very emotional moments in this i mean I appreciate that especially because like I had said some of the best parts about some south Korean shows and movies that I've watched is that they're able to infuse this emotionality to it this pull that will just punch in the gut or rip out your heartstrings because they've been able to get you to care about the characters so much so that when something happens good or bad you have a real remote emotional response to them

there are several questions that are left unanswered when the season concludes and I don't get the sense that they are ever going to go back to answer them and some of these involve elements within the apartment building through dialogue and visuals we're led to believe that these are important that there there's some just important to the story that these have but when the season concludes they're forgotten about never to be mentioned and even the end of the season doesn't fit too well with what we have been shown prior I mean maybe they're doing it just out of convenience but it makes it feel choppy so I had fun with this but the inconsistencies did weigh on me this first season is 10 episodes and each of them are about an hour-long

so this is a time commitment when you sit down to binge honestly I think it could have been trimmed not lose the emotionality of it but by cutting it down some it would have upped the urgency it would have upped that suspense and tension and made it more impactful probably would have increased the thrills a local so there's no sex brief nudity some profanity and a ton of bloody and gory violence give sweet home three and a half out of five couches do you have a favorite South Korean thriller I have a few that I'm really drawn to I mean two of them really are trained to Busan and the host but I'd love to know what yours are in the comments below if you enjoyed this review please share