The police are hunting a brutal serial killer, and that’s just the beginning of this chaos. It turns out that there is something rotten going on in the land of corruption. Welcome to South Korea!
“Mouse” consists of 20 episodes. Most episodes have a runtime of over 1 hour, so be prepared for many long episodes.
South Koreans love their dark serial killer movies and series, and “Mouse” offers a wild ride that will make your head spin around and around. The story isn’t that hard to follow, but it’s hard to follow all the names they throw out and keep track of the faces that connect the names to them. And it’s also a series that lies to you all the time. What you think you saw is usually not the whole truth. This is a series that throws the word “twist” in your face around 50 times or so. I couldn’t keep track of how many times “Mouse” fooled me. And that becomes a problem since 20 episodes are way too many. “Mouse” should have used 12 episodes to tell its story, and then be done.
What surprised me from the beginning is that most of the murders and even weapons are blurred out. The censorship is extreme in this series, so that took me by surprise. It’s distracting, and it ruins a cool scene at the start of the series when the serial killer walks around with a sexy head. That scene is so chilling because two children see their parents getting killed. It’s like watching a darker and twisted Jason Voorhees at Camp Crystal Lake.
I enjoyed the first half of the series. This isn’t a series that takes a break and lets you catch your breath. Something happens all the time, and it’s pretty crazy to experience this high-paced serial killer series. But when it slowly starts to reveal the truth of what’s going on, the quality takes a nosedive, and the realism and mystery vanish into thin air. After that, it becomes a sort of chore to watch the last 8 episodes since the word “stupidity” must be used, and the final episode is way too weak and doesn’t make much sense, especially with the woman who was together with the doctor since she has a child. She didn’t deserve such an ending and the emotional scene that’s important fell flat. It was so stupid, but so is her character and choice when we learn early in the series who she is.
The actors are solid, and they have great chemistry. But all the twists and turns in “Mouse” became too unreal and ridiculous, and that started to turn me off after a while. The frantic editing and switching between past and present can sometimes make you confused, and then they spew out a lot of different names, and I couldn’t connect over half of the names to the characters’ faces. Frantic is the right and easiest way to describe “Mouse.”