There’s something slightly goofy about the animated jazz cues that play underneath the most intense moments of Notes from the Last Row. That’s largely because Netflix’s new k-drama, on paper, ought to be a deeply serious story: a literature professor and failed writer (Choi Min-sik) becomes dangerously obsessed with a young student (Choi Hyun-wook) who shows talent for writing, but may also have psychopathic tendencies.

It sounds like the recipe for a tense thriller, as the 2018 film The Kindergarten Teacher did, for instance, with a similar premise (minus the psychopathy). The South Korean production, however, takes a different path. Notes from the Last Row is a modest tragicomedy about envy and main-character syndrome, at times shot — and scored! — like a biting academic satire, more Dream Scenario (the film with Nicolas Cage as a professor who starts appearing in his students’ dreams) than The Secret History (the Donna Tartt novel that spawned the infamous “dark academia” subgenre).

At the center of this genre experiment is Choi Min-sik, a giant of South Korean cinema who rose to international fame after the success of Oldboy (2003), in one of his best roles in years. Professor Heo Mun-oh is, in a way, an archetype: the grumpy, bitter middle-aged teacher who can’t engage his students and, in return, treats them with contempt, taking out all his frustrations on a job he doesn’t like. And what Choi does, no less than spectacularly, is embody that cliché while underscoring what is most painful about it — deep resentment, self-censorship, the pathetic seriousness of a man who is irrelevant, yet unwilling to accept his own irrelevance.

It’s hard not to root for him, especially because Notes from the Last Row makes him especially vulnerable to the manipulation embodied by his new protégé. As the talented Lee Kang, Choi Hyun-wook (coming off the success of Weak Hero Class) not only holds his own opposite a scene partner with vastly more experience, but also adds an intriguing edge, a hint of moral ambiguity, to the character. His Kang is not, the viewer immediately senses, the innocent prodigy Mun-oh imagines. The obsession the young man harbors for a classmate — and especially the classmate’s mother — is only the tip of an iceberg that may prove far tougher than it looks.

From these two characters, Notes from the Last Row builds the solid foundation on which it rests. On the one hand, Kang’s murky intentions add a purely propulsive interest to the plot, forcing the viewer to hit play on the next episode just to find out how this juicy mess ends. Screenwriter Jang Myung-woo, working from a Spanish stage play by Juan Mayorga, creates situations in which the young man’s infiltration into his “friend’s” life takes on increasingly dark undertones, a setup fully seized upon by director Kim Kyu-tae (The Trunk), who has a field day with voyeuristic tropes left over from the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s.

On the other hand, the dramatic weight of Notes from the Last Row comes from the way these two protagonists mirror each other. In their desire to become other people, their escapes into a more comfortable and rewarding fantasy, their need for adrenaline to dull the absolute boredom of an okay-at-best little life, they reveal themselves to be — improbably, fascinatingly — made for each other.

Notas da Última Fila

Created by: Jang Myung-woo

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