The Guest and the Fight Against Evil

The Guest is a Korean drama created by OCN in 2018 that did quite an apt job at trying to answer the age-old question whether evil is inherent or the work of an otherworldly entity? The answer is yes on both accounts but leans more on the latter. I also do find it interesting that there are overlapping thoughts on evil.

There are three protagonists coming from different backgrounds: a Catholic priest, a detective who is an atheist, and a psychic taxi driver who follows the Buddhist practice of shamanism. One does not simply see these kinds of individuals come together, except if there is a crucial reason for them to.  In this case: to fight a supernatural entity. The trio face a lot of challenges before they were able to finally defeat the big bad. But there were two major challenges that they had to face: what evil means and what it looks like.

To start of, “The Guest” in the show is a supernatural entity – I guess that it is called a guest because this is something that should eventually leave – and it is something both the shaman and the priest understand, albeit differently. Both believe in the spirit and the power that it holds, however the origin of where it comes from and how to deal with it separates one from the other. In the Christian belief, evil does not come from God, rather it comes from the freedom of humans to commit wrongs and thus suffer from the consequences[1],[2],[3],[4]. It is, in short, the misuse of free will. On the other hand, shamanistic beliefs indicates that everything is ultimately intertwined and interconnected thus evil is by both humans and spirits dealing with evil agents creating an imbalance in nature[5]. As for the atheist: evil is evil and it is rightfully going against the law – which, I think, makes a pretty good decision that they made the atheist a police detective. By the way, these are just my initial and surface level research and if anyone wants to go further research on these the links to where I researched are right below. Feel free to start from there.

I think that these differences create a really good antagonist because it makes it hard for the protagonist to fight an evil when they do not even have a shared idea of what evil is. Out of the three of them, the atheist got it the hardest – or the easiest, depending on how you look at it: if something murders, kills, and disrupts the balance of society then it is wrong; it is, therefore, evil. That is why she gets confused beyond her wits when the multiple voices are coming from a singular person or that the young girl sounds like a man. This is when the two boys jump in having answers to the foaming at the mouth, multiple lesions on the body, multiple voices, and the exposition of ones deep dark secret: a bad spirit. The two took turns in convincing the detective until she acknowledged It’s existence.

Now that she is coming to terms of Its existence, what does It look like? Other than the gory details; well, they could pretty much look like anything. For Fr. Matthew, it looks like Fr. Choi, for Jung Eun-chae, the detective, it looks like Park Hong-joo the Councilwoman in charge of the police, and for Yoon Hwa-pyung, the taxi driver, it was his grandfather. These were people they were close too, the people that they trusted the most. It lurked in places they least expected.

Well, it is evil after all.

I think what made these individuals truly evil is that they were all conscious of its nature and they still chose to follow It. Fr. Choi and the Councilwoman was never possessed by any kind of spirit. They were just conscious of the bad spirit yet still they chose to be bad because it was the easiest route and has the path of least resistance. Plus, they were in positions where “bad” does not easily equate to making it easier to hide.  

To conclude, there is evil, it can come to you in many different ways and there are definitely ways to combat such evil. But first, we must realize that it exists. And, this show has rather done a great job in telling us that much.