The Lie We Lived In (Korean Series)

At the center of this Korean BL thriller is a relationship that has to compete with a hostage crisis, a murder mystery and a web of old secrets. The attraction between a professional assassin and a police officer gives the series its most promising tension, but it develops so quickly, and amid such grave danger, that it is difficult to believe.

The assassin is sent to kill a man, then ordered by his boss to keep the captive alive until they can find a phone said to contain video evidence. He cages the man in the basement of the house. Matters become more complicated when the captive’s friend arrives: a cop who has just returned to town after years away and had arranged to stay at his friend’s home. Mistaking the assassin for the captive’s older brother, whom he believes has been studying abroad, the cop waits there despite getting no replies to his texts.

His boss soon tells the assassin to eliminate both men. He cannot bring himself to do it, though, because he is beginning to fall for the cop. A few days later, the officer learns from a colleague that the captive’s older brother died a month earlier. The cop has his own unresolved history: his father died years ago in a mysterious accident that was never properly explained.

Once the cop discovers his friend locked in the basement, he frees him and imprisons the assassin instead. The men trade control in an ongoing game until fragments of the past surface. The original captive was present on the night the cop’s father died, and the assassin, the cop, the boss and the cop’s colleague are all connected to that death and somehow responsible for it. The captive’s eventual revelation as the real villain is one of the series’ more effective surprises.

Across eight episodes of roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes each, the show layers a noir crime story with a dangerous romantic pull. Its production appears to be on a tight budget, and much of the action remains inside a single apartment. The shared loneliness beneath the characters’ lies gives the assassin and cop some reason to gravitate toward each other; as the deceptions unravel, their connection becomes more personal than either seems to have expected.

There are frequent twists, but they did not keep me engaged. The kidnapping, the characters and even the romance often felt juvenile, as if the series were playing more like a high school drama than a serious thriller. The relationship’s speed is especially hard to accept when lives are at stake. In the final episodes, the plot grows tangled, even though the mystery of what happened years earlier does get resolved. This is a decent attempt at a fresh concept, but the execution falls short of its potential. (5/10)