A good trailer will capture your attention, heighten your curiosity, and accurately give a glimpse of what the movie or show is going to feel like. All while keeping the central plot vague or even a complete mystery. The teaser trailer and the official trailer for Mask Girl are very good at their jobs. When I finished both trailers, I had no idea what the actual plot was and I wasn’t sure who the real main character was, both visually and identity-wise, but I knew it was going to be creepy and twisty. Fucked up to put it more succinctly. So if you haven’t watched it yet, go watch Mask Girl, because it is a show that I cannot stop from coating the inside of my brain. Warnings for disturbing content such as graphic violence and some disturbing sexual content. But maybe check if there are any others, because those are the warnings I think are the most encompassing.

If you are reading this sentence, that means you are ready for some spoilers.

Mask Girl‘s official plot synopsis is “Kim Mo-mi, an office worker who is insecure about her looks, becomes a masked internet personality by night — until a chain of unexpected, ill-fated events overtakes her life.” So far, good trailers and a good synopsis because I feel like I know what it’s about, until I try to think about it. I have no idea.

After watching the show, my synopsis would be something like “This is a show about Kim Mo-mi’s life”. There are multiple points of view and characters that we cycle through, but Mask Girl is about Mask Girl. We learn that her lifelong dream is to be a performer, but her visuals stopped her from pursuing that path. Now, she spends her days in a soulless corporate office and nights as a mysterious camgirl under the name Mask Girl. Her name is Mask Girl because she dons a mask during her streams.

At first, I wondered why anyone would watch someone with no face. Not like an anonymous video commentor or voice on a podcast, but a real person with a mask on. It’s eerie to watch, especially as she coos to her audience without a mouth. The show did well demonstrating the appeal of such a setup. A few seconds into one of her streams, and I understood the appeal. A faceless woman with a gorgeous figure. Honestly, that’s probably the ideal way to stream. She is the streaming version of y/n inserts. It also keeps an air of mystery around her. Is she pretty? Ugly? Does it matter if we get to watch her pour milk all over herself? (Yes, this is a real scene.)

But eventually there is a murder, and then another murder, and Kim Mo-mi is forced to go on the run. That brings us to the first change in casting. Lee Han-byeol, who is amazing in her first(!!!) ever role, plays Mo-mi as the original office worker with a secret life. But with two murders now connected to her, she gets plastic surgery and now Im Jin-ah, known more widely as Nana from the kpop groups After School and Orange Caramel, steps in.

This second part of the story is so strange because we actually get two other people’s points of view. There is Kim Chun-ae, a colleague at the club Mo-mi ends up working at, and the one person who is truly Mo-mi’s soulmate. The other one is Kim Kyung-ja, the mother of. Oh Nam-ju, one of the men who Mo-mi killed. Morbidly enough, both of the men died attempting to assault her with one of them unfortunately successful. Oh Nam-ju is also the father of Mo-mi’s unborn child, because of course he is.

More death happens and Mo-mi is eventually arrested and sent to prison, not without starting a few fashion trends though, because the internet is dumb. In prison, people learn not to mess with her. One of the minions of the most influential prisoner tries to intimidate her and learns the hard way that Mo-mi doesn’t take things so lightly. She gets repeatedly thrown in solitary confinement for chasing and beating the minion relentlessly. Truly female rage at its finest.

Eventually, years pass and Mo-mi has settled in prison, but she finds out Kyung-ja has her daughter, Mi-mo (I find her name adorable), and is most likely going to kill her as revenge for her son’s death, even though he absolutely sucks… He quite literally died while raping Mo-mi… Also, this means Mi-mo is her granddaughter, which is ironic.

Skipping ahead to the end, Mo-mi does manage to save her daughter with a clever prison escape, but dies in her daughter’s arms in the process. Poor Mi-mo, she’s been terrorized by Kyung-ja her whole life without even realizing it and when she finally meets her infamous mother, she dies pretty much minutes after.

The ending scene is Mi-mo going through old VHS tapes of her mother performing when she was a young child, too young to be judged as ugly or pretty. When little Mo-mi is asked what her dream is, she says her dream is to be loved by everyone.

I think this ending scene was what solidified this show as very very good. The beginning of the show starts with Mo-mi as the child in the VHS tape and how she grows up learning that she is too ugly to perform. Without the last scene, it would still be a solid show with the dark humor and fucked up content, but tying it back to Mo-mi and what her original, innocent dream was is sad. We’ve watched the trajectory of her life, ending in her dying as an infamous criminal. It’s jarring to see where she started and heart-breaking to see how she ended up. All of that innocence has been shattered and it really shows how lookism can follow someone their entire life, even if this was a very extreme version of the effects.

Rating: S