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Pierce Conran

This article contains spoilers.
The prospect of a gutsy Jun Ji-hyun facing off against the elements in a Cliffhanger-style Korean action-drama made Jirisan the most anticipated show of the year. However ironclad a set-up that might have seemed, this big-budget, star-studded series has had a lukewarm audience response after a big opening weekend.
The main problem with Jirisan, which also stars Ju Ji-hoon, and combines the creative forces of Kingdom writer Kim Eun-hee and director Lee Eung-bok (Descendants of the Sun, Sweet Home), is that it doesn’t come close to fulfilling its promise.
While most viewers came to the series expecting to see Jun engaged in tense mountaineering set pieces while a burgeoning romance raised the stakes in between the action, with a side of ranger camaraderie for comic relief, what we’ve got instead is a muddled story filled with supernatural claptrap and stitched together through different timelines.


The story begins in 2018, when Kang Hyun-ju (Ju) arrives at Jirisan National Park as a rookie ranger and is soon traipsing up the mountains in search of a lost teenager with rock-star ranger Seo Yi-gang (Jun).
By the end of the first episode, we’ve jumped to 2020, as Yi-gang, now in a wheelchair, returns to Jirisan and resumes work, this time behind a desk. Hyun-ju is in a coma owing to a mysterious incident in the past which we don’t find out about until later.
Jirisan: Jun Ji-hyun in earnest mountaineering K-drama
The story then proceeds through both of these timelines. We see Yi-gang and Hyun-ju grow closer in 2018, as they investigate several cases on the mountain. In 2020, Yi-gang gets rookie ranger Lee Da-won (Go Min-si) to help her investigate mysterious occurrences on the mountain.
In the present timeline, it soon becomes clear that a ghost is haunting the mountain. But not just any ghost, as this one wears a ranger snowsuit; by episode four we learn that this spectre is none other than Hyun-ju, even though he’s still alive, albeit unconscious in a hospital bed.
Within these parallel chronologies, the story splinters further with more extensive flashbacks, including a traumatic event when Hyun-ju was serving in the South Korean military and Yi-gang’s backstory, but it also gives us snatches of events taking place between the main timelines that we’ve yet to reach in the 2018 story but are key moments that shaped the 2020 present.

All this narrative trickery points to a single damning fact: Jirisan doesn’t have a very interesting story at its core. Its fidgety structure has merely felt like a way to mask how dull the events of the narrative are. And while we still don’t have all the pieces, it’s hard to imagine that the full picture we eventually get at the end of episode 16 will be a satisfying one.
While the present timeline is largely devoted to exploring the mystery of Hyun-ju’s ghost, the 2018 story is filled with episodic elements which are loosely connected.
This is where we would expect thrilling cliffside feats of derring-do, but Yi-gang and Hyun-ju’s adventures mostly involve provincial matters, with snake poachers, scheming con men and a girl looking for a lost lottery ticket filling up the episodes.
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Yi-gang’s first love, a detective played by Son Suk-ku, pops up at one point. The biggest threats to life involve people being poisoned with tampered probiotic drinks or coming upon deliberately placed potato bombs.
When we first met Yi-gang it was as she rappelled down a cliffside to meet Hyun-ju for the first time, but after eight episodes, the only memorable action the show has come when the rangers team up with firefighters to stop a forest fire getting out of control.
Photographed at night amid canopies of raining cinder, this sequence gives us the show’s most epic imagery, which includes Yi-gang running through the burning forest in wide tracking shots.

It’s a shame that there hasn’t been more of this kind of action – Jun is one of Korea’s most convincing action stars, as her turns in projects from the colonial-era epic Assassination to the Kingdom spin-off episode Ashin of the North this summer show – and we would expect a series like this to flaunt such an asset.
Instead, she broods in a wheelchair in the present and spends much of the earlier timeline calling back to her My Sassy Girl breakout role, from repeating her classic line “Wanna die?” to getting dead drunk and being transported to a bed by her male co-star.

Given Chinese streaming giant iQiYi’s reported massive investment in the show, these nods may very well have been included to capitalise on her popularity in the country.
Meanwhile, Ju with his tousled hair hasn’t been given much to do, either as a bland rookie ranger or as a moping ghost in the mountains.
A major recovery at this point seems unlikely for Jirisan, but let’s hope the next month will bring with it some more action and a resolution worth the meandering journey.

Jirisan is streaming on iQiyi.


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Ju Ji-hoon in a still from Jirisan.

Jun in a still from Jirisan.

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A still from Jirisan.

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A still from Hellbound. Photo: Netflix

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The most anticipated Korean drama series of the year delivers a muddled story full of supernatural nonsense instead of stunning mountaineering action set pieces
Its twin timelines, flashbacks and snatches of events that are key to the plot seem designed to mask the fact that Jirisan has only a dull story to tell



It was supposed to be the big-budget, star-studded Korean drama of the year, but mountaineering tale Jirisan is let down by a confusing plot and too little action.
