The East Palace: This Is Properly Disquieting, Spellbinding Storytelling

In an interview with the Tudum platform for the making-of featurette of her visually astounding new project, star Roh Yoon-seo explained that Netflix’s The East Palace is “an occult fantasy action period series.“

Yes, The East Palace is a genre-blending drama that can be described in a thousand different ways. The show has drawn comparisons to the hellish aesthetics of Netflix’s Stranger Things and Francis Lawrence’s Constantine (2005) as well as to the political thriller-horror tone of Netflix’s Kingdom. The East Palace is indeed a fusion of every “occult fantasy action period” tale that came before it, but it does add its own twist (better yet, twists — a lot of them at that) to the common fare we’re used to.

Creatively directed by Choi Jung-kyu and cleverly penned by Kwon So-ra and Seo Jae-won (who created similarly sophisticated dark fantasy stories in tvN’s Bulgasal: Immortal Souls and OCN’s excellent The Guest), The East Palace is an eight-episode portrayal of human corruption, wickedness, and greed.

Beyond its exciting fighting scenes and sprawling worldbuilding, The East Palace is a haunting reminder that the living can be infinitely more terrifying than the dead. This is a sombre, creepy, and violent journey whose visual extravaganza hides a small yet assuredly alluring rebellion against a highly stratified society fed by the megalomaniac delusions of the royalty.

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Creating a World of Ghosts, Kings, and… Pure Disquiet

The East Palace opens on a dark, rainy night at some point during the Joseon Dynasty. We follow the tragic death of the current Crown Prince (Kwak Dong-yeon). I say “current”, because he’s only the latest on a fairly significant list of Crown Princes who have met an untimely death. The Queen Dowager (Jang Young-nam) has had enough of it all and so, she demands that the King (Cho Seung-woo) acknowledge that these tragedies are the result of a curse by the palace’s pond spirit. The King refuses to believe in such an absurd proposition — after all, “there is no such thing as spirits. How could there be spirits in our Neo-Confucian royal house?” — but the Queen reminds him that, thirty years ago, the Crown Princes also passed away one after another and the pond spirit was to blame.

While the Queen starts taking measures to avoid further misfortune, the King remains impassive. But that’s set to change when his youngest and — last remaining — son (Jo Dan), the next Crown Prince in line, is possessed by a spirit who not only threatens the young boy’s life but declares their determination to eradicate the entire royal lineage.

The encounter between the King and the spirit, who communicates through the afflicted body of his innocent son, is disturbing enough to convince the King that it’s about time he did something about this curse going around his royal court. That’s when he… well, coerces our hero, Gu-cheon (Nam Joo-hyuk), into helping him. Besides his vast knowledge of shamanism, Gu-cheon has the uncanny ability to navigate between our world and the realm of spirits, where he becomes a powerful ghost-slayer. His mission is to find this evil pond spirit and get rid of it before it kills the young Crown Prince — otherwise, the King will make sure that Gu-cheon joins the spectral realm for good.

As per the King’s wishes, Gu-cheon is to be assisted by Saeng-gang (Roh Yoon-seo), an outspoken and courageous court lady who can hear the dead. Together, they then embark on a whirlwind journey of political intrigue, sinful secrets, and monstrous mayhem — that aren’t necessarily due to anything supernatural.

The East Palace is indeed an excellent piece of visual storytelling. Dialogue is written and delivered with surgical precision, turning silence into a powerful tool for establishing mystery and dread. The mise-on-scene is profoundly immersive, the editing is sharply dynamic, the fight choreography is fluid, passionate, and true to its characters.

The cinematography is charged with tension, secrecy, and a sense of suffocating inescapability. Lots of wide shots turn the palace into an active character in the narrative, a monumental presence whose power and status are dangerously seductive and disturbingly overwhelming. Every corner seems to hide a story that should never be told, an enigma that should never be solved, and a loss that should never be remembered.

We are asked to look into its many rooms from the outside, as compositions full of frames within frames turn us into the real ghosts. We’re invited to quietly float from spot to spot and observe characters become ever more confined by their lust for power or the discrimination they are subjected to. At the same time, these compositions make us feel that we’re not the only ones watching these events unfold. We’re given the eerie impression that someone else, whether alive or dead, is also peeking into these conversations, perhaps just waiting for the right moment to make their presence known.

As a consequence, The East Palace boasts some spectacular worldbuilding, carefully devised by both its narrative and visual language. Director Choi deserves unreserved praise for his meticulously constructed spatial design and visual effects, which are — unbelievably — mostly practical. Time Magazine explains:

Many directors rely on CGI to build otherworldly realms, but Choi notes that visual effects only took up about 20 to 30 percent of the final cut when it came to realizing the Realm of the Gwi. “I tried to do as much as I could with production design, so for instance, we would create one set for the real world and another for the Realm of Gwi,” he says. The on-screen result is a visually distinct world that still feels grounded in logic and consequence.

The East Palace Beyond Its Mesmerising Visuals

Thematically, this is a story that feels very close to Netflix’s recently released sci-fi thriller Human Vapor in its examination of human avarice and social oppression. In The East Palace, the powerful are willing to do anything to keep the brutalising systems that benefit them running as smoothly as possible. With strict social hierarchies in place, low-ranking royal servants are nothing but expendable pawns in the royalty’s vicious power games. Political rivalry then fuels endless cycles of pain, injustice, and obsession, which victimise and wrong many in life or death. The East Palace exists in a world of little forgiveness and empathy, but a lot of revenge and self-indulgence.

The narrative that weaves all these elements together finds a solid foundation in Korean folklore and slowly reveals itself as a complex fabric made of all sorts of twists and turns. Some of these twists might feel a tad predictable, but some are bound to catch you off guard. Most of its loose ends are satisfactorily tied up by the end of the show, but The East Palace wavers in making sensible use of some of its secondary characters (what’s the point of that second shaman?) and fails to avoid a few melodramatic decisions along the way. That’s probably why its pacing feels a tad volatile: some episodes are a lot tighter than others, but some instalments inevitably mark a lull in the development of the main plot.

What remains unchanging, however, is the superb dynamic between Gu-cheon and Saeng-gang, which easily stands for the core of The East Palace. They serve as a strong emotional tether to the story in the way that they exist as flickers of light in the darkness, drops of kindness in a sea of ruthlessness.

Their relationship evolves organically throughout the series as Gu-cheon and Saeng-gang realise they not only mirror but complement each other. “Gucheon” literally means “the other world” (구천), a term that is used in a longer expression that means “the one that wanders between the living and the spirit realm” (구천을 떠돌다). Meanwhile, “saenggang” means “ginger” (생강), an ingredient celebrated for its healing qualities. Therefore, Saeng-gang needs Gu-cheon to traverse between worlds to help her understand and overcome her past, while Gu-cheon needs Saeng-gang to be his source of vitality and hope.

That also means that they are equally important to the narrative: Saeng-gang is never portrayed as a mere sidekick, but as a heroine who is as influential as her fellow hero. They must work in tandem if they want to succeed, and the script never lets them forget that. They are both given compelling, well-rounded personalities, whose clashes allow them to grow. Nam Joo-hyuk and Roh Yoon-seo bring their characters to life with considerable zest and respond to each other with charming naturalness (and Roh once again proves to be a powerhouse of a dramatic actress who definitely deserves a lot more attention).

Throughout the series, their joyful bickering offers just a pinch of lightheartedness and their desperate longing to protect each other gives humanity and heart to The East Palace. Those are very much needed considering that Jang Young-nam delivers an evil, maniacal villainess whose performance exudes spine-chilling madness. That’s not to mention the impeccable Cho Seung-woo, who portrays a layered character guided by twisted, ambiguous, and complex motives. He’s simply mesmerising as he blends vileness and vulnerability in a role that never lets you get too close, but entices you to figure out what sort of secrets he so fiercely hides.

Should You Watch The East Palace?

If you’re looking to scratch an itch for a series that blends dark fantasy with action galore and an intense historical drama, The East Palace certainly is a tempting option full of thrills and technical prowess. Counting on a talented cast, remarkable visuals, and an intriguing narrative, this series is nothing short of an atmospheric, unsettling, and engaging adventure for fans of similar genre-blending fare.

The East Palace isn’t as scary as it is shocking, turning the supernatural into a tool for the exploration of the sickening lengths people will go to maintain their power and protect their self-interest. Because while there’s something undeniably exhilarating in the unknown, The East Palace reminds us that true horror lurks among the living.

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