It’s a whodunit. It’s a medical procedural. It’s science fiction. It’s film noir! It’s a bloodstained rendition of the old song “Thanks for the Memory”!
It’s all that and it’s called “Dr. Brain,” now on Apple TV+. With “Squid Game” now officially Netflix’s most-watched series — an ultraviolent, gorier “Hunger Games,” ideal for reduced-standards pandemic viewing, as was “The Tiger King” in early 2020 — Apple TV+ has hustled its own South Korean property into international circulation.
“Dr. Brain” comes from a webtoon, aka digital comic, and the six-part limited series will make new episodes available each Thursday. The story literalizes the idea of how we carry memories of others around with us, in a procedure (unauthorized; very hard to get insurance to cover it) involving hacking into people’s brains to access memories for the purposes of mystery-solving.
Little bits of “Frankenstein,” “Altered States” and a hundred other predecessors float around the moat of the story. The “brain sync” sequences, in which our quietly obsessive brain scientist hero hacks into the noggin of his comatose wife or (my favorite) a dead cat, drip with visual possibilities. Creator and director Kim Jee-woon imagines each unauthorized neurological experiment a little differently, just as Martin Scorsese handled each boxing match in “Raging Bull” differently.
The final two episodes of “Dr. Brain” may frustrate the give-it-to-me-straight-no-more-dream-sequences-please crowd, i.e., my fellow Americans. But as a genre mashup, and craftsmanship, the series is super-sleek, very violent and pretty sharp.
It’s also blithely unafraid of imperiling its child characters early and often, handing the key character a lifetime’s worth of internalized anguish in the first 20 minutes. After witnessing the brutal death of his mother, the specially gifted future brain researcher Sewon Koh (Lee Sun-kyun, the rich, cold father in “Parasite”) grows up to suffer even greater losses. His 5-year-old son, who lies somewhere on the autism spectrum like his father, dies in a mysterious explosion. Sewon’s wife (Lee Yoo-Young) becomes another casualty of sorts. I’m keeping this vague, since the episodes drop weekly. The trailer, on the other hand, keeps few secrets regarding the foul play underneath it all, and the larger conspiracy bubbling in “Dr. Brain.”
A snarling private detective (Park Hee-soon) starts nosing into Sewon’s affairs, bringing up what Sewon has known all along: that his wife had an affair with another man. But is Sewon’s son truly dead? The series progresses from brain sync to brain sync, with Sewon mining the memories of his wife, and others, for clues to what really happened to his family.
As Sewon conducts more and more unauthorized procedures, his own mind becomes an unreliable blur of other people’s memories. He does, however, get a superpower or two for his trouble: The session with the dead cat leads to surprising feats of jumping and landing on his feet when he really needs it. Wisely, “Dr. Brain” doesn’t push that element of personality and physicality transference. Much of its action, and bleeding, relies less on science fiction and more on old-fashioned, guns-and-knives battles to the death. The director of “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” and “A Tale of Two Sisters” keeps the violence rough, fast and stylishly effective, and this side of relentless. Sewon has his own cerebral ways of crime solving, in every sense of that word; the police — Seo Ji-hye plays a wary detective who wonders if Sewon’s responsible for all the bodies piling up — have theirs.
“Just when you think you know a thing or two, you die,” says one prominent character (no spoilers!) who dreams of sustaining his legacy well into the future. “Dr. Brain” may think it’s saying something larger and more philosophically provocative than that (it isn’t), but it works without an extra dimension of meaning. I suppose that’s the value of punishing your protagonist, relentlessly: At some point the audience just wants the grief to abate, and if the story takes care of that, there you have it. Whole sections of “Dr. Brain” are silly as hell, but to paraphrase the old song: You might’ve been a headache. But you never were a bore.
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‘DR. BRAIN’
3 stars (out of 4)
TV rating: TV-MA
Running time: Six episodes, about six hours total
Where to watch: Now streaming on Apple TV+ (new episodes each Thursday)
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