Let's just cut right to it, this show was painfully boring. There, I said it. A story built around partial amnesia has real potential, but between the choppy scene structure and random flashbacks thrown in constantly, the whole plot ends up feeling more tangled than it needed to be. The romance doesn't fare much better either, it's written so poorly that I never really found myself invested in this couple. Both leads come across stiff on screen and deliver their lines in a really awkward way. The show runs 8 episodes, each somewhere around 30 to 35 minutes. Hanuel, a 29 year old language teacher, wakes up after an accident only to realize his memory stops at age 19. It turns out he'd been in another accident back then too, which is why his memories cut off at that point. He has zero recollection of the fact that he's currently living with his childhood friend Saebyeok, who's now a huge celebrity. That makes the whole situation even harder for Hanuel to wrap his ...
Aiden's a cop in Sydney fighting hard not to masturbate, since he's dealing with some form of sex addiction and has convinced himself that abstaining makes him both physically stronger and a sharper cop. He takes this so far that at one point in the middle of the film he actually buys himself a chastity cage. He's part of a unit working the queer district, and his lesbian boss orders him to pose as a gay man to infiltrate a gay club, since overdose deaths in the area are spiking. That's where he runs into Cody, a young twink working at this sketchy bar who's under the thumb of a local drug dealer, pimp, crime boss, and drag queen all rolled into one, Fat Frankie. Aiden, still trying desperately to keep his urges in check, starts developing feelings for Cody while getting dragged deeper into the murky, morally gray politics of this whole underworld. The two of them start hitting up various drug fueled parties trying to dig something up, but every five or ten minutes another twist gets thrown in, and honestly I lost the thread completely. Cody and Aiden end up having an affair, and Cody starts helping Aiden try to steal some video tapes from Fat Frankie containing evidence that could take down some cops. In the middle of all this, Fat Frankie ends up dead, so now the police are hunting Cody. He gets caught but manages to escape, and Aiden goes after him. Then out of nowhere, the lesbian boss and her retired father throw in yet another twist, and by that point I'd completely lost track of the drugs, the sex, and whatever this movie was even trying to accomplish.
This is obviously meant to play as an erotic thriller, packed with a handful of sex scenes, shirtless guys, and plenty of nudity throughout. Right from that early scene where Aiden arrests Cody and it turns into some kind of sexual role play, it's pretty clear this is meant to establish that Aiden's both an idiot and a terrible cop, long before he later admits to sexually assaulting a male suspect who might've been underage. I really don't think the filmmaker was going for anything particularly smart here. The dialogue dips into camp territory more than once. The acting is turned up way past natural. Every plot twist lands more like a wink to the audience than a genuine surprise. And yet somehow none of it feels like an accident, it's clearly all intentional. This definitely isn't a movie for everyone, and it wasn't for me either. It fully commits to melodrama, eroticism, and pulp without any hesitation. It tries to pull you through a story built on urgency, delivering what's supposed to be a gripping cop procedural filtered through a queer lens. It wants to be this unapologetically gay, steamy, full throttle cop thriller with brains behind it. Yeah, the actor playing the cop is attractive, and honestly that's about the only thing that worked for me here, though even his performance ends up feeling pretty stiff. At times it plays like some late night cable thriller someone dug up on an old VHS tape and lovingly restored for people watching today. (3/10)
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