Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Somebody’ On Netflix, Where An AI-Assisted Dating App Is Being Used By A Serial Killer To Find Victims

There are plenty of shows that have delved into the deleterious effects of technology, but have we seen a show where a serial killer uses an AI dating app to pick his victims? And then he falls in love with the autistic coder who made the app? Probably not. A new thriller from South Korea, though, checks all those boxes.

SOMEBODY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A girl in a school uniform puts up her umbrella as she walks down a rainy, dark street in Seoul.

The Gist: The girl is at a back-alley gambling den; she’s an ace coder, and she’s there to rig video pachinko machines to favor the house. She works there pretty much 24/7, as she seems to have no family. But she also has been using some of the video game console components to create something on the side, which she shows at her school’s science fair. It’s an AI-driven chatbot she calls “Some one”. When a judge asks her to explain the program, the shy girl mentions that the AI actually monitors if a shy user deletes a response to something, then speaks up on that person’s behalf.

Flash forward a few years later, and Kim Sum (Kang Hae-Lim) has taken the technology she developed for Some one and turned it into a dating app called Somebody. She’s now the CTO, and despite the fact that she’s has ASD and is uncomfortable being the public face of the company, she’s on display at headquarters when it hosts a wedding between two of its users. She’d much rather be in her office, with her huge CRT monitors and the stark (but soothing to her) white and grey color scheme. She’s most comfortable chatting with her original Some one app, as it understands her best.

Word is filtering out via the press that some recent murders share the commonality that the victims all used the Somebody app. As Sum tries to get to the bottom of this, her team finds that a number of profiles were created using different SIM cards on the same phone. She decides to start matching with those profiles to see what comes up. She finds the chat she’s having with the user to be very artificial, as if it was the bot giving the answers. But when she sees an injured cat outside her office and asks the user what to do, his response speaks volumes. She wants to meet him.

A man pulls up in a van; Seong Yun-o seemed to be curious enough to meet Sum in person, as well. She tells him that the police are looking for him, but she’s intrigued by his charming but off-putting manner, and requests that they go to his workplace. At his office, the two bond over their neurodivergency, and they somehow manage to flirt while playing an organ that’s in storage. But then we see what Yun-o is using the app for when he meets a woman and drowns her while they have sex in her tub.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Somebody has a creepy Silence Of The Lambs feel, though with a more polished, techy sheen on it.

Our Take: Somebody is a thriller, but it’s a quiet, slow-moving thriller that’s a little weird. After the first episode, we’re not sure where things stand as far as what Sum knows about the killer using her app to find victims. We have an idea, but writers Jung Ji-woo and Han Ji-wan spend much of that first episode making things a bit more cloudy than you might expect from a serial killer tale.

We appreciated the visual touches that are a part of Sun’s solitary life. She loves vintage computer equipment, as we see by her use of big CRTs in both her home and work offices (which are identical, by the way) and the old Macs and other items she has neatly stored in a spare room in her house. It’s an effective way of showing viewers that she’s different, but doesn’t have a ton of angst about it. We also appreciated a score that was reminiscent of a 1940s noir film instead of a typical thriller.

We’re not sure what she knows about Yun-o at the end of the first episode. She knows he’s been using different profiles, but has no idea if he’s been the person attacking users or not — at least that’s what we think is going on. What we do know is that she connects with Yun-o in a way that she hasn’t in the past, and the extended sequence with the injured cat tells us that she has a bit of a taste for blood, even if that was the first time she satisfied that taste.

As the season goes along, the murders are going to be investigated by Sum’s friends Mok-Won (Kim Yong-Ji) and Ki-Eun (Kim Soo-Yeon). They’re going to need Sum’s help, and we’re unsure about how much or little she’ll give them, given what is an obvious attraction to Yun-o. But it’ll be interesting to see where an already twisty thriller goes as more people get murdered.

Sex and Skin: There’s some nudity when we see one of Yun-o’s victims; it’s one of the hallmarks that tells us that this is a Netflix production, not a series Netflix licensed from a South Korean network or studio.

Parting Shot: Yun-o deletes the profile of the woman he just drowned and replaces it with a profile whose nickname is simply “6”.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the CGI cat who looks disturbingly real, especially as it writhed in pain on the side of the street.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not sure, but we get the feeling that Samantha, the CEO of Somebody, is played by an actress hired by Sum because she would rather sit in her office and code. When she talks to her investigators, and they keep saying that they need the permission of the CEO to do things, she hits a key and a Google speaker blurts out a laconic “Okay”. It’s a little silly.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While the first episode of Somebody moves a bit slowly, and is decidedly strange (the organ scene is weirdly sexual, and we’re talking about an actual organ, with keys and everything), it sets up an intriguing scenario that should have a lot of twists and turns.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.