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This review may contain spoilers
Nine Puzzles – A Star-Studded Crime of Narrative Self-Sabotage
Some dramas stumble. Nine Puzzles tripped, faceplanted, then asked you to applaud it for bleeding artistically. It is a prime example of a show so filled with potential—so stacked with acting talent—that its failure feels not just disappointing, but infuriating. Watching it is like being promised a game of high-stakes chess and instead being handed a rigged claw machine with the words “Mystery Thriller” taped to it.
Let’s start with the good, because the cast deserves our reverence.
Kim Da-mi, in her role as profiler Yoon E-na, delivers a performance that is deliberately hard to love—sharp-edged, emotionally distant, and prickly enough to test your empathy. It’s a character designed to repel, and yet somehow, you keep watching her, curious, frustrated, intrigued. The issue is not Kim Da-mi’s delivery—it’s that the script doesn’t do the bare minimum to tell us why she is the way she is. Is she neurodivergent? A trauma survivor? A cold-blooded genius with no social skills? The show shrugs and says, “Eh.” We're left watching a complex character whose wiring is never explained.
Son Suk-ku brings his signature grit to Detective Han Saem—a man worn down by the job and cracked open by the discovery that someone he once respected might be a murderer. Son injects weight into every scene, carrying the emotional undercurrents the lazy script forgets to include. You see it in his eyes: the man’s been through something. Unfortunately, the script never really lets him show you what.
Park Gyu-young, however, is the late-game savior of this catastrophe. Playing the killer (yes, it’s not a spoiler anymore), her transformation from warm, nurturing psychiatrist to stone-cold executioner is a masterclass in acting. Her microexpressions, the controlled drop in vocal tone, the way she holds her body—it’s chilling, magnetic. And just when you think she’s all icicles and steel, she shifts again—this time into a woman carrying the crushing weight of guilt. She deserved a better show.
Even Kim Sung-kyun as Violent Crimes Unit 2’s Captain Yang Jung-ho brought a surprising softness to his role, showing a side of him unfamiliar to audiences used to his more comedic or tough-guy personas. But even he couldn’t escape the black hole of a script that made no sense of his character’s altruism—something even he admitted in interviews he couldn’t understand.
And now, let’s talk about the script. Or more accurately: the crime scene.
This is a mystery that commits the cardinal sin of the genre: it spoils itself before it even gets going. By episode 2, a sharp-eyed viewer is already raising an eyebrow, sensing the pattern. By episode 3, the drama practically brings out a whiteboard and starts connecting red yarn to the killer’s identity with the urgency of a bored middle-schooler doing a book report. It draws a chalk outline around the culprit, paints her in silhouette, and then—just in case you still had doubts—throws in an unmistakable feminine frame and long hair bathed in dramatic lighting. Subtlety? Never heard of her.
The so-called “thriller” element relies entirely on the assumption that the audience isn’t paying attention. There’s no misdirection. No red herrings. No artful manipulation of perspective. Instead, it’s like watching a magician start a trick by showing you the hidden card, then dramatically revealing the same card ten minutes later like it’s a mind-blowing twist. Spoiler alert: it’s not.
The killer isn’t just poorly concealed—she’s practically introduced as the killer through writing choices that scream, “It’s me!” without actually having the guts to say it out loud. And yet, bafflingly, the drama continues to treat her identity as a secret, dragging us through episode after episode of characters playing catch-up while the audience sits there, mentally checked out, waiting for the show to acknowledge what it already accidentally admitted.
Even worse? The drama doesn’t even try to throw us off the scent. There are no fake-outs, no narrative curveballs, no psychological sleight of hand. It doesn’t attempt to gaslight the audience or reframe events from an alternate angle. It simply coasts along with the weakest defense imaginable: hoping you weren’t paying attention. And when the full reveal finally comes in episode 10—of an 11-episode series, mind you—it doesn’t feel like a twist. It feels like the show finally catching up to what the rest of us knew seven episodes ago.
By that point, the only remaining mystery is “Why?” But here's the problem: once you’ve solved who the killer is so early, the “why” has to be earth-shattering. It has to redeem the narrative with emotional depth, with psychological nuance, with a reveal that recontextualizes everything. Instead, what we get is a rushed, half-hearted explanation with zero build-up, delivered too late and with too little care. And because the show never earned your investment to begin with, that final explanation lands with the emotional weight of a damp paper towel.
It’s not just frustrating—it’s insulting. The writers didn’t just underestimate the audience’s intelligence; they disregarded it completely. What could have been a tense, cerebral cat-and-mouse between profiler and killer turns into a one-sided snoozefest, where you’re not watching to uncover the mystery, but merely to endure the inevitable.
This isn’t storytelling. It’s narrative malpractice.
Let’s talk about the murders. Or rather, the complete suspension of logic required to believe any of them.
The killer in Nine Puzzles doesn’t operate like a human being. She moves like a glitched-out NPC in a stealth video game on God Mode. One minute, she’s sipping tea. The next, she’s three neighborhoods away committing a murder with the precision of a surgical strike team and the invisibility of a ghost. It’s as if she unlocked a cheat code that lets her phase through locked doors, disable every CCTV camera in Seoul, and bypass security systems like she’s Neo in The Matrix.
This isn’t criminal genius—it’s narrative laziness.
There’s no explanation offered, no groundwork laid to show how she pulls these flawless executions off. She enters secure areas with no evidence of how she got in, commits murder without leaving a trace, and escapes unnoticed despite being a known suspect in a city blanketed in surveillance tech. It’s not suspenseful—it’s absurd. If anything, the killer feels less like a real person and more like a ghostly plot device with an unlimited travel budget and access to a portal gun.
And the profiler? The one we’re told is brilliant, intuitive, uniquely capable of dissecting a criminal’s psyche? She barely does any profiling. No psychological cat-and-mouse. No mind games. No mental chess match that a good thriller lives and dies by. Her deductions are shallow, occasionally lucky, and frustratingly passive. Most of the “investigation” feels like a rehash of things we already saw, without any real insight or emotional weight added.
Meanwhile, the killer doesn’t even try to hide. The murders practically sign her name in cursive, and she strolls through the plot as if she knows she’s invincible—because the script makes sure she is. There’s no attempt at covering tracks, no manipulation of evidence, no red herrings to throw the profiler off. Just a trail of bodies and a drama that somehow thinks this counts as clever writing.
And the police? Don’t even get me started. They're reduced to exposition machines and reaction shots. No one questions the glaring holes in the investigation. No one follows leads with urgency. No one even acts like they're chasing a serial killer operating at a supernatural level of efficiency.
So when the promotional materials promised us a battle of wits—a Sherlock vs. Moriarty showdown—we expected a cerebral thriller, a clash of intellects, a high-stakes duel between two brilliant minds. What we got instead was a series of loosely connected crime scenes strung together like a sad Pinterest board of thriller clichés.
The profiler doesn’t profile.
The killer doesn’t hide.
The detectives don’t detect.
It’s Scooby-Doo—but with prettier lighting, better tailoring, and none of the fun. You keep waiting for someone to rip off a mask and say, “And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling plot holes!”
But no one ever does. Because there is no mask. The killer’s been standing center stage the whole time, and the show simply hoped you wouldn’t notice.
By episode 11, the entire narrative collapses under the weight of its own delusions. The story doesn’t end—it just kind of gives up. Like the writers realized they’d painted themselves into a corner with invisible ink and hoped no one would point it out.
Verdict:
I am livid.
Nine Puzzles is a masterclass in wasting star-studded talent. Everyone in this cast deserved better. They fought tooth and nail to elevate a script that kept dragging them down like narrative quicksand. And the worst part? The script never cared to fix itself. Never once did it attempt to surprise us, challenge us, or even pretend it respected our intelligence.
In a genre that requires precision, Nine Puzzles was a blunt instrument.
The only mystery here is how this got greenlit in the first place.
Score: 3/10
Let’s start with the good, because the cast deserves our reverence.
Kim Da-mi, in her role as profiler Yoon E-na, delivers a performance that is deliberately hard to love—sharp-edged, emotionally distant, and prickly enough to test your empathy. It’s a character designed to repel, and yet somehow, you keep watching her, curious, frustrated, intrigued. The issue is not Kim Da-mi’s delivery—it’s that the script doesn’t do the bare minimum to tell us why she is the way she is. Is she neurodivergent? A trauma survivor? A cold-blooded genius with no social skills? The show shrugs and says, “Eh.” We're left watching a complex character whose wiring is never explained.
Son Suk-ku brings his signature grit to Detective Han Saem—a man worn down by the job and cracked open by the discovery that someone he once respected might be a murderer. Son injects weight into every scene, carrying the emotional undercurrents the lazy script forgets to include. You see it in his eyes: the man’s been through something. Unfortunately, the script never really lets him show you what.
Park Gyu-young, however, is the late-game savior of this catastrophe. Playing the killer (yes, it’s not a spoiler anymore), her transformation from warm, nurturing psychiatrist to stone-cold executioner is a masterclass in acting. Her microexpressions, the controlled drop in vocal tone, the way she holds her body—it’s chilling, magnetic. And just when you think she’s all icicles and steel, she shifts again—this time into a woman carrying the crushing weight of guilt. She deserved a better show.
Even Kim Sung-kyun as Violent Crimes Unit 2’s Captain Yang Jung-ho brought a surprising softness to his role, showing a side of him unfamiliar to audiences used to his more comedic or tough-guy personas. But even he couldn’t escape the black hole of a script that made no sense of his character’s altruism—something even he admitted in interviews he couldn’t understand.
And now, let’s talk about the script. Or more accurately: the crime scene.
This is a mystery that commits the cardinal sin of the genre: it spoils itself before it even gets going. By episode 2, a sharp-eyed viewer is already raising an eyebrow, sensing the pattern. By episode 3, the drama practically brings out a whiteboard and starts connecting red yarn to the killer’s identity with the urgency of a bored middle-schooler doing a book report. It draws a chalk outline around the culprit, paints her in silhouette, and then—just in case you still had doubts—throws in an unmistakable feminine frame and long hair bathed in dramatic lighting. Subtlety? Never heard of her.
The so-called “thriller” element relies entirely on the assumption that the audience isn’t paying attention. There’s no misdirection. No red herrings. No artful manipulation of perspective. Instead, it’s like watching a magician start a trick by showing you the hidden card, then dramatically revealing the same card ten minutes later like it’s a mind-blowing twist. Spoiler alert: it’s not.
The killer isn’t just poorly concealed—she’s practically introduced as the killer through writing choices that scream, “It’s me!” without actually having the guts to say it out loud. And yet, bafflingly, the drama continues to treat her identity as a secret, dragging us through episode after episode of characters playing catch-up while the audience sits there, mentally checked out, waiting for the show to acknowledge what it already accidentally admitted.
Even worse? The drama doesn’t even try to throw us off the scent. There are no fake-outs, no narrative curveballs, no psychological sleight of hand. It doesn’t attempt to gaslight the audience or reframe events from an alternate angle. It simply coasts along with the weakest defense imaginable: hoping you weren’t paying attention. And when the full reveal finally comes in episode 10—of an 11-episode series, mind you—it doesn’t feel like a twist. It feels like the show finally catching up to what the rest of us knew seven episodes ago.
By that point, the only remaining mystery is “Why?” But here's the problem: once you’ve solved who the killer is so early, the “why” has to be earth-shattering. It has to redeem the narrative with emotional depth, with psychological nuance, with a reveal that recontextualizes everything. Instead, what we get is a rushed, half-hearted explanation with zero build-up, delivered too late and with too little care. And because the show never earned your investment to begin with, that final explanation lands with the emotional weight of a damp paper towel.
It’s not just frustrating—it’s insulting. The writers didn’t just underestimate the audience’s intelligence; they disregarded it completely. What could have been a tense, cerebral cat-and-mouse between profiler and killer turns into a one-sided snoozefest, where you’re not watching to uncover the mystery, but merely to endure the inevitable.
This isn’t storytelling. It’s narrative malpractice.
Let’s talk about the murders. Or rather, the complete suspension of logic required to believe any of them.
The killer in Nine Puzzles doesn’t operate like a human being. She moves like a glitched-out NPC in a stealth video game on God Mode. One minute, she’s sipping tea. The next, she’s three neighborhoods away committing a murder with the precision of a surgical strike team and the invisibility of a ghost. It’s as if she unlocked a cheat code that lets her phase through locked doors, disable every CCTV camera in Seoul, and bypass security systems like she’s Neo in The Matrix.
This isn’t criminal genius—it’s narrative laziness.
There’s no explanation offered, no groundwork laid to show how she pulls these flawless executions off. She enters secure areas with no evidence of how she got in, commits murder without leaving a trace, and escapes unnoticed despite being a known suspect in a city blanketed in surveillance tech. It’s not suspenseful—it’s absurd. If anything, the killer feels less like a real person and more like a ghostly plot device with an unlimited travel budget and access to a portal gun.
And the profiler? The one we’re told is brilliant, intuitive, uniquely capable of dissecting a criminal’s psyche? She barely does any profiling. No psychological cat-and-mouse. No mind games. No mental chess match that a good thriller lives and dies by. Her deductions are shallow, occasionally lucky, and frustratingly passive. Most of the “investigation” feels like a rehash of things we already saw, without any real insight or emotional weight added.
Meanwhile, the killer doesn’t even try to hide. The murders practically sign her name in cursive, and she strolls through the plot as if she knows she’s invincible—because the script makes sure she is. There’s no attempt at covering tracks, no manipulation of evidence, no red herrings to throw the profiler off. Just a trail of bodies and a drama that somehow thinks this counts as clever writing.
And the police? Don’t even get me started. They're reduced to exposition machines and reaction shots. No one questions the glaring holes in the investigation. No one follows leads with urgency. No one even acts like they're chasing a serial killer operating at a supernatural level of efficiency.
So when the promotional materials promised us a battle of wits—a Sherlock vs. Moriarty showdown—we expected a cerebral thriller, a clash of intellects, a high-stakes duel between two brilliant minds. What we got instead was a series of loosely connected crime scenes strung together like a sad Pinterest board of thriller clichés.
The profiler doesn’t profile.
The killer doesn’t hide.
The detectives don’t detect.
It’s Scooby-Doo—but with prettier lighting, better tailoring, and none of the fun. You keep waiting for someone to rip off a mask and say, “And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling plot holes!”
But no one ever does. Because there is no mask. The killer’s been standing center stage the whole time, and the show simply hoped you wouldn’t notice.
By episode 11, the entire narrative collapses under the weight of its own delusions. The story doesn’t end—it just kind of gives up. Like the writers realized they’d painted themselves into a corner with invisible ink and hoped no one would point it out.
Verdict:
I am livid.
Nine Puzzles is a masterclass in wasting star-studded talent. Everyone in this cast deserved better. They fought tooth and nail to elevate a script that kept dragging them down like narrative quicksand. And the worst part? The script never cared to fix itself. Never once did it attempt to surprise us, challenge us, or even pretend it respected our intelligence.
In a genre that requires precision, Nine Puzzles was a blunt instrument.
The only mystery here is how this got greenlit in the first place.
Score: 3/10
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