‘Glitch’ Review: Struggles to Connect the Narrative Structure Together
Netflix’s new Korean drama, Glitch, is a show made for conspiracy theorists. It follows an ordinary girl whose life turns upside down when her boyfriend goes missing. She believes that he was abducted by an alien. The ordinary, bespectacled protagonist reunites with her childhood-turned-stranger friend and gets pulled back into the obsession she thought she left behind.
Hong Ji-hyo (Vincenzo’s Jeon Yeo-bin) is an ordinary girl with a steady job and a dependable boyfriend, Lee Shi-kook (Lee Dong-hwi). She doesn’t enjoy her life and spends most of her energy pretending she doesn’t see aliens, especially the green alien that wears a baseball hat and follows her everywhere. One night, Ji-Hyo follows the alien to the top of the roof, but she doesn’t remember any of it. Instead of explaining everything to Shi-kook, she breaks up with him and resumes her life believing things aren’t will get back to normal. When Shi-kook disappears on the face of the Earth, Ji-hyo realises that something might be wrong. The police suggest that he might have moved abroad since his bank account reveals that he bought a ticket to Canada and left Ji-hyo for good. But she knows that something is off. She tries to get in touch with an anonymous conspiracy theorist and UFO group and asks for their help to find Shi-kook. Ji-hyo reunites with Bo-ra (Nana), a childhood-turned-stranger friend, and meets the rest of the conspiracy theory gang. Bo-ra and her UFO group help Ji-hyo to find her boyfriend and uncover some secrets hidden in a strange cult.
Glitch is an unpredictable show that doesn’t try to follow any trends set in the Western media. It focuses on the female friendship between Ji-hyo and Bo-ra. The childhood friends, who were super close during their school years, had a fascination towards aliens. As a child, Ji-hyo’s obsession with aliens drove her to test a way to communicate with them. The fallout of their friendship is shown in intermittent flashbacks and it reveals that Bo-ra’s rebellious influence was something that Ji-hyo’s parents found quite distracting for their daughter. The show slowly reveals that Ji-hyo had lost some of her memories when she was supposedly abducted by an alien. Ji-hyo doesn’t trust her lost memories. Bo-ra is an avid conspiracy theorist and the leader of the UFO group is determined to get to the bottom of a religious and alien-worshipping cult.
Furthermore, an aspect of the show explores the cult and its root in the alien abduction of a young woman years ago. Now, the young woman that was abducted by the alien sits alone in a home staring into space, while her followers call her “Mother” and take care of her every need. The cult’s followers patiently wait for Mother to predict the next Messiah, who she draws on a piece of paper. It’s interesting to see how the cult presumably has enough power to control the area and the police however they please. Their stance on alien worshipping is dangerous and puts other people’s lives at risk. Throughout the series, Bo-ra and Ji-hyo link back to old cases of people being abducted by aliens and somehow, the cult is responsible for it. It’s not long after the two friends find out what happens within the walls of their church and a hospital known for brutal, voluntary suicides of the residing patients.
Glitch struggles to answer some questions. Do aliens really exist and where did Ji-hyo’s boyfriend disappear? The narrative structure doesn’t try to focus on her relationship with her boyfriend, which is a good decision made by the writers, Ji-hyo’s character is not as interesting as Bo-ra’s. Her history as the rebel and lonesome girl brings more depth. It would have been interesting to see Bo-ra’s journey from a rebellious child to a curiously crazy UFO enthusiast. She’s weird and loud and has a much more interesting history than Ji-hyo.
For the most part of the earlier episodes, Ji-hyo struggles to make a connection with other people and she never tries to step out of her comfort zone. Her denial that the cult or aliens might be responsible for her boyfriend’s abduction is due to her memory loss. After she reunites with Bo-ra, her father fears that she might go back into the same obsession and tries to pull her back into reality. But as the story progresses, Ji-hyo slowly believes that the alien worshipping cult could possibly be responsive, for everything becomes more believable as they investigate.
Glitch has a fascinating narrative concept, however, it slowly begins to confuse itself by trying to figure out whether Ji-hyo is imagining the aliens or not. It wastes a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of the story, especially the secrets behind the cult. When Shi-kook’s disappearance is resolved, the rest of the alien abduction and the cult’s storylines turn out to be ridiculously foolish. The backgrounds of the characters aren’t interesting enough to keep the plots holding themselves together, and it gets hard to emotionally invest in their journeys. Glitch doesn’t quite pull itself together due to its issues with the narrative structure.
