Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sweet Home’ Season 2 on Netflix, Where The Monster Apocalypse Continues To Plague Humanity (But Is It Really All Bad?)

Sweet Home Season 1 hit Netflix way back in 2020, and quickly became a Top 10 favorite. The monsterized K-drama, based on the long-running webtoon of the same name by Kim Carnby and Hwang Young-chan, finds South Korea overturned by the arrival of monsters in numerous forms. Once human, these newly evolved creatures have a tendency to act like the walkers of a certain unkillable zombie franchise. But they’ve also been known to retain human attributes like empathy and care for the sick and helpless. Sweet Home, named for the apartment building whose residents we met in the first season, shot its second and third installments simultaneously, so let’s get on board as the “monsterization” moves beyond one building and into the streets of Seoul. 

SWEET HOME – SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: At the Korean military command center on Bamseom, the islands that rest astride Seoul’s Han River, experiments into the monster apocalypse’s origins and effects continue. In a laboratory chamber, one particularly emaciated patient still breathes, even as he’s hooked up to a million electrodes and machines. 

The Gist: As season one of Sweet Home concluded, the apartment building residents who’d managed to survive all of the various monster attacks – a group that includes determined ballerina Lee Eun-yoo (Go Min-see), bespectacled Kang Seung-wan (Woo Jung-Kook), bassist Yoon Ji-soo (Park Gyu-young), and Son Hye-in (Kim Guk-hee), the nervous owner of intrepid white pomeranian Bom – found their way out of the building, only to be rounded up by the armed patrols that roam the city. Brave firefighter Seo Yi-kyung (Lee Si-young) also survived, as did suicidal teenager Cha Hyun-su (Song Kang). But the latter each see cooperation with the military through their own aims. Seo is ex-special forces, and pregnant, and still searching for her missing (monsterized?) fiancé, while Hyun-su’s unique transformation into a human-monster hybrid makes him one of the most special of the “special infectees,” as the military refers to those who exist in a kind of monsterization limbo.

Now, as the Sweet Home residents are trucked into a nightmarish refugee camp situation by soldiers with itchy trigger fingers – they tend to shoot humans who exhibit anything close to the nosebleeds and other signs of being overtaken, even if they’re just conventionally sick – they encounter a half-wrecked city where monsters of all types huddle in piles of debris or still cling Gollum-like to bits of their humanity. (In a ruined mall, a monster with the look of a zombified human but for its four arms hoards Hermès handbags.) One other such creature, which sort of resembles a giant salamander with human-like limbs and a wormy alien face, soon unleashes havoc on the refugee column, though most of the resulting bloodshed is caused by soldiers firing at it wildly and hitting innocents instead. Bullets, grenades, flamethrowers – these monsters can take a beating. But it soon becomes clear that the salamander-ish organism is only protecting its young. 

And wait til you get a load of what that offspring looks like. In Sweet Home, the process by which humans become monsters is still not fully understood. (Hence the frequency of awful lab experiments on those turned.) But it’s as Seo’s researcher fiancé said last season – “It’s not a disease; it’s a curse.” And what sort of monster a person becomes, how their mutation manifests, seems to be a reaction to their emotions and desires as humans. Perhaps that’s why Hyun-su is so intent on retaining his humanity even as he becomes monsterized, harboring incredible strength and the ability to quickly heal. There is much more to be learned about this monster apocalypse. And in fact, it might not be an apocalypse at all.   

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Sweet Home’s Lee Jin-wook also stars in Netflix’s Bulgasal: Immortal Souls, which layers in fantasy and horror elements to its tale of immortals, monsters, and the humans who know the centuries-long truth. And now that Sweet Home is expanding its scope beyond the environs of its titular apartment building, the Seoul in chaos that’s revealed bears a resemblance to the world of the entertaining, very bloody, and recently renewed for a second season K-zombie series All of Us Are Dead. 

Our Take: “Are…we the baddies?” Not to reduce Sweet Home to a meme, but the comparison works when we’re talking about its second season, because in the early going, it’s human fears and hierarchies at the root of so much of the violence, and not the emergence of a monster apocalypse. Sure, a lot of the monster stuff is terrifying. But it’s also terribly confusing, for the monsterized and the humans these creatures encounter. It’s the military and the kind of shadowy forces who observe horrible lab experiments from beyond protective glass who are doling out a lot of death in their search for a “cure,” dropping plane loads of leaflets on Seoul that offer reward money to humans who turn in special infectees. Are these forces working towards eradication of the threat, or are they the threat in itself, driven to harness what makes people monstrous and weaponize it? That question forms one of the most interesting threads of Sweet Home as it moves into its second season. And luckily, the guys with the guns have yet to contain Hyung-su.

As his understanding of his own mortal/monster hybridization continues to evolve, Hyung-su is bound to become even more instrumental to Sweet Home. With his one black-saturated creature pupil and his one human blue one illustrate, he exists at the center of this new form of being. Panicky soldiers continue to chase him, shouting that they need him to make their cure. But do they? Are they? Would he even survive whatever experiments they conducted on him toward that end? So far, the lab work we’ve seen often ends badly for the patient. As Hyung-su confronts not only those who’d wish to contain him, we’ll also gain valuable insight into what his transformation means for the humanity he still retains.    

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode beyond the wasted skin of nude CGI monsters.

Parting Shot: Jung has forcibly brought Hyung-su to the gates of Bamesom in hopes of freeing their special infectee brethren. But more destruction is unleashed once the soldiers guarding the entrance open fire. “I don’t ever want to forget the fact that I’m human,” Hyung-su tells his captor as they both lie wounded in the flames and rubble. And Jung, driven mad by his condition, just can’t believe it. “Go to hell…”

Sleeper Star: Lee Jin-wook is one to watch here. In season two, as the body of his character Pyeon Sang-wook is revealed to be the current host for fluid-limbed “neohuman” Jung Ui-Myeong, Lee lets his good looks and charm get invaded, twisted, and ultimately usurped by Jung’s mean streak and mania.    

Most Pilot-y Line: As the monster apocalypse continues, so does the military establishment’s research into its reasons and causes. “Mankind is nothing from Earth’s perspective,” Dr. Lim (Oh Jung-se) says, summarizing human evolution as a minutes-long blip in the grand scheme of things. What if the monsters are a natural result of giving another species a chance to survive and thrive? “Mankind is a virus. And the monsters are the vaccine.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sweet Home has a three-year run of the webtoon it’s based on to work from, and there are lots of ideas popping off as it returns for its second season. There is monster movie-style violence and destruction here, with a side of zombie themes. But it’s also asking a bigger question: were we the monsters all along? 

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.