Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bargain’ On Paramount+, A Korean Thriller Where An Earthquake Traps Organ Traffickers, Their Customers And Victims In An Old Hotel

It feels that some of the most outlandish shows over the past few years are coming from South Korea. No American could have come up with Squid Game, for instance, no matter how hard they might have tried. Now there’s a disaster series from Korea that somehow combines organ trafficking with surviving an earthquake.

BARGAIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A girl in a school uniform smokes while looking out a motel window, looking at a wooded vista outside.

The Gist: Noh Hyung-soo (Jin Seon-kyu) enters the room wearing a suit. He is under the impression that the girl, Park Joo-young (Jeon Jong-seo), is an 18-year-old virgin. They met on a dating site and he is paying her $1000 to take her virginity. Then she tells a story about a teacher sexually abusing her in middle school, and Hyung-soo tries to talk her fee down, rationalizing that she’s not physically a virgin anymore.

The two of them scream at each other, and he talks her down to $70. When he goes to shower, though, she walks out of the room, negotiating another meeting with someone else. She eventually enters a room that’s a brothel of sorts, with the guy in charge cursing out the women and taking a big cut of the money they bring in.

Then she leaves the room and goes into another room, where bidders with paddles, who have fronted large amounts of cash, are gathered. Joo-young is happy to tell them that they have a regular citizen to bid on. Hyung-soo is wheeled out on a stretcher, a gag in his mouth, still in his underwear. The bid is on his organs, starting with his kidneys.

The kidney bidding gets heated, especially when one bidder, Guk Ryeol (Chang Ryul) gets desperate, bidding money he doesn’t have because his father needs that kidney so badly. This is when Joo-young brings up the option of a loan, with the lender offering his organs as collateral. During the bidding, a bang is heard, and the doctors and bidders want to leave, but everyone is reassured that some construction work is being done nearby.

As the second kidney is being bid on, a massive earthquake hits and the old building starts crumbling.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Bargain, directed and written by Jeon Woo-sung, is based on a short film directed by Lee Chung-hyun. Apparently, the earthquake was tacked onto the organ trafficking plot for the series. It has the ominous feeling of Stranger Things, but there really is no equivalent to this series we can think of.

Our Take: Organ traffickers? Customers? Victims? All trapped in a building? If this feels like a twisted version of The Towering Inferno, you wouldn’t be far off. And that’s the mindset you need to watch a show like Bargain. It’s completely batshit crazy, and doesn’t make a lot of sense at times, but it’s certainly creative an ballsy and a whole lot of things that we don’t tend to say about shows coming from this hemisphere.

What kind of fever dream did Jeon have when he paired the original short about organ trafficking, one that he worked on, and paired it with a disaster scenario, where all of these people with such varied reasons to be there all needing to work together to survive? Thank goodness that he was able to write that fever dream down, and then turn around and sell this crazy pitch to a producer and a number of streamers around the world.

The continual shots, seamlessly edited together, and the naturalistic, overlapping dialogue ramp up the tension when we see Joo-young negotiating with Hyuing-soo, and then dealing with the bidders. And we loved how Jeon Jong-seo was able to convey Joo-young’s world-weary point of view even as she tries to get someone to believe she’s an 18-year-old virgin. Just the way she handles the cigarettes she smokes shows someone who’s way more sophisticated than she lets on. And after the earthquake hits, it seems that she’s the only one who has a plan.

The second episode susses out just who will be trying to escape the rubble with her, but we won’t mention that here. Suffice to say an extended scene at the bottom of a hole in the building is creepy and off-putting but definitely unique.

Is there an overriding plot aside from escaping the rubble? Is there any kind of character development? Not really. But a show this crazy doesn’t really need that, as long as it continues to be daring through its entire run.

Sex and Skin: None, aside from seeing Hyung-soo in his red boxer briefs.

Parting Shot: The earthquake hits, and the building crumbles.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the cinematographer and camera operators who are consistently able to execute Jeon’s vision of constant, swirling tension.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Joo-young says the phrase “pop my cherry,” Hyung-soo says, “Cherry? Do people still use that slang? I thought it was from my generation.” No, we think “pop your cherry” is still used… isn’t it?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Bargain‘s premise is so crazy that it’s fascinating to watch just to see if it can be pulled off without going off the rails.

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.