[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Nightmare Teacher" Episode 9-12 Final

The fifth contractee ends up getting so entwined with Ye-rim and Sang-woo that when the time comes for her to go through to the mirror universe, Ye-rim and Sang-woo mostly remember what happened. This sets up the final contract, in which the question of who Bong-goo is and why he keeps getting students to sign contracts is...not really satisfactorily resolved. Bong-goo remains enigmatic as ever.

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It's not necessarily a bad thing for an anthological style spooky story to be open-ended about the motivations of the antagonistic figures to the point where it's not even clear they're antagonistic at all. For most of "Nightmare Teacher" I didn't even really care about who Bong-goo was or what he wanted anyway, because he was just a storytelling device designed to dig around into the dreams of the students and expose them as nightmares. yet at the end, the purported explanation or lack thereof is too unsatisfying to ignore.

Which is a shame, because in bits and pieces the direction of the last four episodes feature lots of great moments. "Nightmare Teacher" has always been a drama best watched in the dark, because even if there aren't literal shadow creatures on the screen, any unexpected action can quickly take on freaky proportions. The magic cell phone app is perhaps the most frightening artifact Bong-goo has because cell phones can run out of power. If you don't have a cell phone, do you die?

Even ignoring the general qualities of this specific cell phone there's a good social statement in there, as has been the case with every individual story we've seen. If a person becomes overly reliant on a specific thing, then that person becomes disconnected from their real essence of being- their actual physical skills. As the afterword shows, it was striving for too much that did the students in. They were all perfectly capable of subsisting, if not necessarily thriving.

Which kind of sort of ties in to Ye-rim's contract, and how it did kind of take her an awful long time to get involved considering some pretty crazy stuff was happening even before she started noticing the missing seats. Like suicide attempts? Come on. Even so, these elements aren't that well-explored so Ye-rim's foray into the mirror world only manages to be generally spooky rather than a legitimately excellent capstone. So "Nightmare Teacher" isn't perfect, although I suppose one way to look at it is, perfection is just a fantasy anyway.

Review by William Schwartz

"Nightmare Teacher" is directed by Hyeon Moon-seob , written by Hyeon Moon-seob and Jeong Yoo-seok-I and features Uhm Ki-joon, Kim So-hyun, Lee Minhyuk and Seo Shin-ae.