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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Bridal Mask"

As popular as masked heroes with secret identities are in popular culture, there's surprisingly little real analysis of how this psychically affects the person wearing the mask. Try to imagine yourself treating a person that you genuinely love in a completely different, possibly even violent antagonistic way, solely because you're wearing a mask. Even if you could stomach that kind of lie and deceit, how do you think that would make your loved one feel? What if you discovered that a person who you love was antagonizing you under an assumed identity? Would the reason even matter? Would that make the betrayal any less painful?

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These are the essential questions that lie behind "Bridal Mask". Kang-To (played by Joo Won) is a Korean man working under the Japanese colonial administration in the early twentieth century. Through sheer determination and desperation to help his otherwise destitute mother and brother, he's risen through the top ranks in spite of his racial differences. Kang-To has made a name for himself going after members of the Korean resistance. He meets a determined and dangerous obstacle in the form of "Bridal Mask", a man who uses an assumed identity to wreck havoc against the imperial Japanese government.

But even absent that Kang-To has serious issues. His only friends are either Japanese or other Japanese collaborators who are about as well-liked by Koreans as Kang-To is. The fact that it wasn't always like this quickly poses a problem for Kang-To, who soon finds that making the most of his new position in life quite literally requires killing any connection he has to his old one. This is all sobering stuff- and "Bridal Mask" hits its best dramatic moments when its characters are forced to confront the very extreme conflict between what they want to do and what they have to do.

Enough about that, though. "Bridal Mask" is first and foremost an action series, and on that level it delivers spectacularly. There's great blocking, extended chases and escapes, and when a fight actually has to break out, there's absolutely no skipping away from it. The sword battles are intense and not a single move is wasted. Every time someone thrusts their blade somewhere, it accomplishes something and forces someone else to react somehow. Additionally, the numbers of characters with clearly established abilities in hand to hand combat is quite high, and the show is very good about providing us with compelling fights where there's genuine ambiguity about who's going to come out on top.

Even outside of these traditional mainstays of the action genre, there's a great amount of scheming action. Not anything you could legitimately call a real fight, but in my mind, if something ends in an explosion and brings up a genuine question of who's going to live through it, that counts. What's great about this is that any character can be the one to pull off the definitive action that makes or breaks the operation. This results in quite a bit of genuine surprises.

There's a romantic angle as well that's surprisingly well-integrated into the story. In some ways I was honestly disappointed with Mok Dan (played by Jin Se-yeon). Her first scene in the series implies a competence on her part that really doesn't show up often enough. And yet, I like and appreciate the way her character is integrated into the narrative. Without getting into too much detail, Mok Dan is very much the heart of the resistance movement. Those familiar with history know that Korean resistance against their Japanese overlords was rather bleaker than what "Bridal Mask" makes it look like. And yet, the people involved never gave up. It takes a very impressive determination to keep up that kind of attitude, and Mok Dan wears it often.

This does bring up a point of contention, though, in so far as the villains are concerned. For the most part I was convinced that they posed a genuine threat to the heroes- but at 28 episodes long it gets increasingly difficult to take them seriously. The strange part is that I can't really point to any one annoying plot twist that felt like an unnecessary extension of the story. The conflict is continuously escalating at a reasonable pace, so it doesn't feel at all out of bounds when we've moved from local bank fraud to actual war crimes committed by Imperial Japan. It's just sort of a strange dichotomy that at any given moment I normally feel far more threatened about the abstract concept of the Japanese Empire than I am about any of the characters who individually represent it.

Which, oddly enough, may be part of the point. Masked heroes always seem to unambiguously change the world for the better and never have any meaningful failures. But "Bridal Mask" deftly notes that the war against Japan happened on an incredibly massive scale far beyond the scope of this drama. Even though there are plenty of well-positioned, well-designed patriotic moments, we never really forget that fact. The character of "Bridal Mask" has enormous meaning for the characters in this drama, but when it gets right down to it, "Bridal Mask" is just a symbol. It has exactly the same power that we ascribe to it personally- nothing more, and nothing less.

It's for these reasons that I can write, with no exaggeration, that "Bridal Mask" is the best masked hero story that I have ever had the pleasure of consuming. The genre often lends itself to trite, pulpy nature (I had to resist writing "superheroes" multiple times during this review), and while "Bridal Mask" definitely has these moments, there's an earnest seriousness to its portrayal of the characters involved that made me realize this was not a child's game, even though it clearly has the superficial trappings of one. This is a life-and-death situation these people are dealing with- and when people get that desperate, symbols are all that stands between a glimmer of hope and the pit of despair. There's genuine meaning in that kind of finality- and it was something I could only realize when I had seen "Bridal Mask" all the way through to the end.

"Bridal Mask" features Joo Won, Jin Se-yeon, Park Ki-woong, Han Chae-ah and Shin Hyun-joon.

Review by William Schwartz. William Schwartz is an American currently living in Gyeongju, South Korea, where he studies Korean and themes in Korean media.


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