‘The Glory’ brings audience to the edge of their seats

The glorious effect of revenge

Fair use from Netflix

Fair use from Netflix

Nafisa Kahin

“The Glory” is a heinous show. It features a young student getting severely bullied by five classmates of hers. 17-year-old Moon Dong-eun (Song Hye-kyo) gets horribly bullied after saying ‘no’ to cleaning the bathroom for the main abuser, 17 year old Park Yeon-jin (Lim Ji-yeon). Later on, Dong-eun drops out of school because she couldn’t handle the bullying anymore. Later on, everybody went their separate ways as adults.

All of the bullies became successful in life as a business owner, a weather forecaster, an artist and a flight attendant all while Dong-eun waits and plots for her revenge. Then, they all have a high school reunion meeting Dong-eun and that’s when everything starts in the TV series, “The Glory.”

The casting is done so well, as young versions match almost identically with their older selves. The plot is very satisfying, considering how Dong-eun placed her revenge for each and every person who’s ever destroyed her life while she was a child. Song Hye-kyo played Moon Dong-eun, and portrayed the broken character so well. There’s a scene where she popped up at Lee Sa-ra (Kim Hieora)’s church and gave a death stare. Usually, when a character does a death stare they look angry or have a sense of rage, but with Song Hye-Kyo, she made sure she didn’t wear her emotions on top of her sleeves and did what a death stare would realistically look like.

As for the soundtrack, it fits really well. For each time a form of betrayal happens, the music would show the emotions of the character’s facial expression. There’s barely any romance scenes in part one, but for part two there were some and the music would just express the love between both characters to the audience.

The clothing portrays the status of each character’s position in the show itself. When it came to the bullies, every one of them became successful only because of their parents and how they were all born with a golden spoon in their mouths. The way they dress and the way they throw money at people who are going through poverty shows how much wealth they grew up with. The main bully, Yeon-jin, showed how wealthy she and her family were in part one because Yeon-jin’s mother (Yoon Da-kyung) pays Dong-eun’s mother (Park Ji-A) to withdraw from raising her and she actually disowned her for money.

Most scenes project corruption and how the systems of schools, police stations and even a church are broken. Showing people like police officers, priests at a church, teachers at an elementary school and many more corrupt figures later in the episodes. Such a negative thing going on because you can never know who’s clean or dirty from corruption.

I truly recommend “The Glory” because of the great suspense, the drama and how quick the show came with their main objective and plot. It did a really good job of grasping the attention of the audience and much more. Hopefully after reading this review people can see how great of a show “The Glory” is.

“The Glory:” ★★★★★