This is a show that I know it's probably better than what I'm giving it credit for. But this is a personal review so it is entirely my preference.

Honestly it was a very hard to watch show because of the subject matter. The twisted religious aspect is pretty uncomfortable to watch. Add bullying, suicide and child molestation and you got yourself a realistic horror on screen. The situations that are presented on screen are terrifying and it is just not an enjoyable experience. But if you have no problems with this sort of content I think you might enjoy this drama more than I did.

I do have to say, the acting is brilliant. Everyone did such an amazing job to bring their characters to life. I think that's why I had such a hard time watching this show. The villain characters are sick and scary in a realistic way. They are twisted, disgusting and frustrating to see on screen. That is a job well done by the actors but I'm not sure it's a very enjoyable experience for the viewer. The hero characters are somewhat frustrating to watch for a lot of the drama. With the exception of Dong Cheol, I wanted to slap almost everyone on screen. When you have quite a few threatening villains but only one competent hero accompanied by a group of useless stupid boys who are terrible friends, it's a combination for a very frustrating experience.

The pacing of the drama is really slow for a lot of the first half. Once the set up is done and we get to the cult part I hard to watch at fast speed because they drag these uncomfortable scenes so much until we finally get to the active ML part. For a lot of the drama Sang Hwan (ML) is a reactive character and when he pursues a more proactive role, he is quite frankly useless and stupid. This is a ML that I found it very hard to root for for a lot of the drama. I think he is a well written character, the actor does a great job, but I just don't think he's a very likeable character. And so whenever a scene with him popped up I was hoping it would end and give me another Dong Cheol scene (the actual good boy we need).

FL plays the role of a victim for a lot of the drama. Her character has a strong personality though and you can see she is actively trying to fight back but she's just not strong enough to really accomplish much. In the first half her scenes are pretty hard to watch because of this. But it gets more bearable after the midpoint. The actress portraying her is haunting and brilliant.

From episode 9 onwards things become easier to watch and I had a more enjoyable time. The drama picks up speed and becomes better. But the path to get there is really draggy in a torture porn kind of way. The ending was a bit rushed but nothing I can't forgive. I wished they had given us more time to enjoy the karma part of the drama when it came to the villains. A lot of them do terrible things and we don't see them suffer enough at the end so I felt a bit disappointed that so much screen time was dedicated to torture FL but we only got to see some of the worst people getting arrested and nothing more. It was a bit of a let down and it made it feel like all that time we had to watch them make FL suffer was for nothing.

All in all I think this is a solid drama if you are into dark, horrific, twisted stuff. The story is frustrating and scary and it accomplishes what it's set itself to. If you can stand a lot of screen time with that you will probably have a better time than I did. I personally am not going to rewatch this one. The acting is extremely solid but most of the characters are frustrating so it is not a very enjoyable time.