Susin High School, nicknamed
"Prison High," is an elite school attended by the top 1% of students
in the country. Their stellar marks are the result of constant pressure and a
strict punishment system, to the point where students avoid from any activities
outside of studying. It is in this atmosphere that seven students and a teacher
remain at school for the winter break, joined by Kim Yo Han, a psychiatrist who
was forced to take shelter with them after he was involved in a car accident
nearby. At a time when everyone else is celebrating Christmas Eve, the students
realize that the anonymous letters they each received were not the result of a
harmless prank; there was a murderer in their midst. A question lies unspoken:
Are monsters created, or are humans born monsters?
This is not your average drama. To begin with, it's only eight episodes
long - a minidrama special. This is a good thing, because if it were any longer
than eight episodes, I probably wouldn't be here today. I would be six feet
under the cold, hard ground.
Not only is it a minidrama, but it stars actors before they were considered
really 'famous' and it's incredible to watch how good they were even then, and
how far they've come.
The setting and cast are small - less than ten main characters to focus on,
and so we get plenty of time to get to know them. They are all incredibly
complex, and rarely have I seen such attention to detail in any drama, show, or
movie. The thing that's mentioned in the first episode is used in episode
seven, or the line spoken by someone in episode three comes back to bite them
in episode six. The rule of Chekhov's gun (if you see a gun on the wall in the
first act, it must be fired by the third) is used to devastating effect.
This is not a fast-paced, happy or lighthearted drama by any stretch of the
imagination. Ask anyone who came into contact with me the week after I saw it -
I was broken into pieces. Fiction hadn't broken my heart like that since I could
remember. It's one of those dramas that makes you think and feel so much that
it's hard to process - I couldn't properly talk about it for a few days after I
saw it, even though people were asking questions. I had to think about it, long
and hard. I had to ponder it and gnaw on it and digest it and cry over it, and
in the end, I was astonished at the complexity of it all.
So astonished, in fact, that I knew I hadn't caught everything; and I'm
planning a re-watch of it during November. This may seem odd, trying to fit
that in with NaNoWriMo, but White
Christmas was one of the most inspiring things I have ever seen, as far as
my writing was concerned. My writing improved by leaps and bounds after I saw
it, and it's one of those dramas that stays with you.
I can joke about it now - and in fact, I have, as evidenced by the batch of
text-post edits I made below. But if you ever want to be emotionally destroyed
and forced to think about the nature of humanity to insane levels, and if you
ever want to watch something that will leave you changed forever, consider
watching White Christmas. You'll probably regret it, but you won't be sorry.
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