REVIEW: ‘Bargain’ Is A One-Shot Wonder

I love a one-shot. When done effectively, they add drama and intensity to sequences in the action genre, but when overused, they can become a muddied mess. But what about a television series that is all just one continuous shot? Well, it actually works. The first South Korean Paramount+ Original series, Bargain (Momgap) is created by Byun Seung-min, directed by Jeon Woo-Sung, and written by Jeon and Choi Byung-yoon. Director Jeon takes a big risk by using one shot for the entirety of the series, utilizing the design of the set and not edits to frame and move through rubble with characters as they fight, fall, and desperately try to survive.

Bargain is a six-episode series that offers a lot of dystopian world-building and thrilling stakes, using a natural disaster as a catalyst for the conflict. In the series, men are lured to a remote hotel under the guise of sexual encounters, only to be caught in a trafficking ring where their organs are auctioned off to the highest bidder. The audience follows Joo-young (Jeon Jong-seo) as she tricks the misogynistic and really creepy Hyung-soo (Jin Seon-kyu) into becoming a slab for auction.

Utilizing double entendre and suggestive elements, the showrunner banks on what the audience knows about brothels and creepy old men to build a facade for the series. It’s uncomfortable only to be shattered when the curtain is peeled back to reveal that the underworld trade that Joo-young is involved in is somehow even worse than what you thought, but with her in a more powerful position.

Then, an earthquake hits. After the catastrophic event, Bargain is off to the races as a series. The victims, traffickers, and buyers are all trapped inside the crumbling building. With Joo-young representing the trafficker, Hyung-soo the victim, and a desperate kidney buyer, “The Good Son” (Chang Ryul) all working together—when they’re not fighting—to get out alive. Cut off from the outside world, they must fight to survive the aftermath at any cost and make any deal they need to do.

Bargain gets a lot of things right as a series. The characters for one are each immediately recognizable and leave an imprint on you despite how quickly you meet them, and often they drop out only to drop back in. With such a fast pace, the series never loses its characters and instead uses their conflicts as a fitting reason for physical fights, turning up the tension and ultimately giving the audience a full sense of what the world they live in is like. This part is particularly key because instead of laying out rules for the organ auction right from the beginning or even describing what kind of organization Joo-young works for, the series shows it to you instead.

Sure, character dialogue is used to build out the world, and expertly so, but it never once feels like an exposition dump. Instead, because these revelations happen in key moments of survival, the audience can latch onto them and better understand the situation. This allows the series to act like a snowball, picking up momentum and narrative weight before slamming into the audience in the final moments of the last episode.

The pacing is also one of the most intriguing things about the six-episode series. Because of the way that director Jeon Woo-sung chose to execute the story, with one single continuous shot, there is no resting for the characters or the audience. In order to keep everyone in view at the exact moment, Jeon must match the pace of the bodies moving on screen, and he does so with a deft hand, using cracks in the building to move uninterrupted into new viewpoints.

Additionally, by choosing one take as the way in which the series is shot, the viewer’s knowledge is deeply restricted. You will know exactly what Jeon and writer Choi Byung-yoon want you to know when they want you to know it. Characters peel off in different directions, fall into holes, and then reappear in ways that are always entertaining and always make their absence have a weight to it.

As you look at the roles that characters play in the story, you can see the ways in which Bargain excels as a series. Because we’re always grounded in the selfishness of humans trying to survive, both after the earthquake and before, the meanness represented in the series is both shocking and believable. There is a level of unhinged chaos to the violence we see on screen, and yet all of it is rooted in some form of separation or another, making it all the more understandable.

The one-shot style of the series also allows Bargain to capture some truly fantastic action sequences as characters fight each other without edits to hide behind. The actors in this series, primarily Jeon Jong-seo, Jin Seon-kyu, and Chang Ryul, are each unafraid of tackling tough fight choreography or exploration, and more importantly, they sell every minute of it. The characters seal the deal for the series, but because of the strength of the cast to jump into the thick of it all without the ability to hide behind jump cuts, making this acting endeavor a brave one.

A good disaster series, a great action series, and an even better character study on the desperate people doing desperate things, Bargain captures the audience from the moment the uncomfortable facade it presents you is shattered, and the organ trade takes the focus until the bitter end.

One of the top series of the year by a mile, Bargain is innovative, smart, mean, and filled with a talented cast and crew that is unmatched by any production out right now. If this is an example of the caliber of international projects that Paramount+ is investing in, sign me up for every single one.

Bargain will stream as a full series exclusively on Paramount+ on October 6, 2023.