REVIEW: ‘Trigger’ Is Netflix’s Most Disturbing Series

Directed by Kwon Oh-Seung, Trigger (2025) tackles uncharted territory for Korean television and series. Billed as an action-thriller, the series is more serious than the concept looks on paper. Starring Kim Nam-Gil and Kim Young-Kwang, Trigger is gripping from the first moment, rivaling series like The Glory in just how uncomfortable it can make its audience. 

In Trigger, the normally gun-free South Korea is all of a sudden a landscape of chaos as a mysterious courier delivers guns and ammunition to vulnerable people. The guns detonate the landscape with a wave of unimaginable violence as powerless people at their breaking point are told that the weapon can save them from their situation. 

The central figures in the story are Detective Lee Do (Kim Nam-Gil), a former special forces soldier, working in the police department. He’s used guns before, but he’s also promised never to take another life. On the other side is Moon Baek (Kim Young-Kwang), an eccentric man with terminal cancer who lies at the center of the gun distribution as the only person knowing the list of where guns have been shipped to. 

Trigger (2025) is an unsettling action series from Kwon Oh-Seung.

Despite working together, Moon Baek and Lee Do are on entirely different paths and moral sides of allowing people to have guns. Lee Do believes that the moment you pick a weapon, you have to choose to take a life or not, and it stains you each time.

Moon Baek, on the other hand, believes that people should have the power to bring their own life or generally find peace in their terrible situation, even if he doesn’t explain it all. As they work together to stop the next shooting before it happens, the fissure between them grows.  

As the series explores its sensitive and sensationalized topic, it oscillates between traditional crime, where there is a case to solve, and something more somber, looking at the worst parts of who we are and what we go through as people. The series moves between being about the way that people break, the way society facilitates it, and the adrenaline of a police story. 

Trigger has a larger message at the start, and it’s about a culture of silence. 

Watching Trigger as an American isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s seeing a showrunner take a reality that you live in because of a lack of gun laws and treating it as a wild mystery to solve. In one episode, a student almost kills his entire school, and in another, a tenant in a complex shoots everyone in it because his neighbor was too loud. And another still, a grieving mother shoots the company leader responsible for overworking her son, which led to his death. 

The situations as they’re presented are hyperbolic. Still, in the school episode, where the students attempt to seek shelter in a library, we all remember Columbine and every subsequent shooting after. Trigger Episode 6  is by far the hardest to watch; it was like stroking a raw nerve. But this gun violence exploitation that the series uses isn’t without its commentary. 

Trigger wants to make its viewer deeply uncomfortable, and at some points, I did have to turn it off, come back, and revisit my thoughts. That’s why this review is being published so far after the series premiered on Netflix. But still, even though it felt like it kept stroking a raw nerve, I understood what it was doing. 

Netflix’s Trigger is hard to get through at times, but it’s well worth enduring. 

The series’ ultimate message is that America isn’t singular in its ability to commit gun violence; Americans just have access. It’s the access that allows murder to happen, but ultimately, Korea isn’t immune to it. Severe burnout to the point of ruining your health as a result of overworking is a reality. The unbearable weight to succeed from family and society is a constant. Uncontrolled loan sharks are causing families to go into debt because of their scams. And finally, an uncurbed and severely violent bullying culture in schools all come together to highlight the pain points in Korean society. Ultimately, though, the lack of mental health recognition and support means Koreans are as much powder kegs as Americans.  

It would be easy to look at Trigger and see its wanton violence as something built to shock for the sake of it constantly, but every person given a gun was chosen because of how desperate they were. A lack of resources amplifies their vulnerabilities, stress, and pain. We know that not everyone who has to carry trauma will harm someone else, and the series knows that too. 

In a scene at the school, Lee Do has the chance to stop one boy from using the gun to take revenge on his bully. When I say bully, I need you, reader, to understand that it is different in other countries, especially in East Asia. Korean school bullying is often depicted as consistent physical violence and isolation. Outside of popular culture depictions, in the real world, it has led to increased rates of suicide. 

When Lee Do stops the shooting from escalating, he doesn’t talk about how bad killing the bully is, or how it won’t erase the student’s pain. What he does say is that he just wants to hear the pain that Park Gyu-Jin (Park Yoon-Ho) has been carrying. Lee Do hugs him, gives him his shoulder, and ultimately tells him to talk. 

Kim Nam-Gil and Kim Young-Kwang are excellent in their roles as two men on opposite sides.

Trigger can easily be reduced as just another exploitation series sensationalizing gun violence because it doesn’t exist in Korea as it does in other parts of the world. It can be put into an action bucket because of its well-choreographed sequences of hand-to-hand combat. But this is a series and a story about South Korea’s culture of silence that allows the vulnerable people to be milled through systems and institutions and ignored as they suffer. 

The only time that Trigger flounders is when it switches to an all-out push for power in a gang. Where the rest of the episodes centered on pain, a couple of episodes focus on the pull for power. It’s a reality of guns for sure, but it also makes the series’ tone imbalanced. It goes from being heavy with something to say to being an action thriller first. 

The mystery man delivering the guns in the series antagonist isn’t doing it as an agent of chaos. In his mind, he is an agent of justice. Justice that he didn’t receive, and justice that he is delivering to the powerless in the city. When we realize that the man behind it all is Moon Baek, we’re given his tragic backstory.

It’s easy to understand the need for justice when the world has wounded you beyond repair. Moon Baek is consistently seen as the villain, but his motives and the way he exploits people’s pain are always the context in which we see him. 

Guns are always bad in Trigger, but the system that allows the rot that they exploit is worse.

One thing that Trigger does is stoke the fear of guns; it builds them into something larger by taking every situation and stretching it to the worst it could be. But it doesn’t leave the guns as the only element of society taking the blame, and that’s where the series succeeds. 

Trigger is Netflix’s most disturbing series, and its ability to move from a regular crime drama into an unsettling spectacle of gun violence with so little effort is unnerving. Still, its message is heard loud and clear if you take the time to look instead of being moved by the sensationalization. 

Trigger isn’t perfect, with its clunky handling of some serious topics, often choosing only to show the high-level impact due to its choice to tackle multiple societal issues within its episode count. But the series is well worth enduring that all. If only to understand how not normal it is for the United States to have mass shootings so frequently, and how our reality is the worst nightmare of other people. 

Trigger (2025) is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.