K-drama Rose Mansion: Lim Ji-yeon stars in apartment-set mystery-horror, which trades story for gratuitous sleaze and violence

Rose Mansion, set in a residential block in Seoul, follows a hotel worker who discovers bloodstains on the floor when she visits her father’s flat

The uncomfortable outbursts and displays of pointless violence are compounded by the lack of storyline

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K-drama Rose Mansion stars Lim Ji-yeon as a hotel worker who becomes caught up in a violent horror story.

Published: 12:15pm, 23 May 2022Updated: 1:10pm, 23 May 2022

An apartment block in Seoul becomes a site of fear, violence and mystery in the new Tving streaming series Rose Mansion, the first small-screen effort from established film director Yoon Hong-seung (The Target), who goes by the pseudonym Chang.

Lim Ji-yeon (Luck-Key) leads the story as a hotel worker in Busan who returns to her father’s apartment in Seoul when her sister goes missing. With shifty characters lurking around every corner of the neighbourhood, it doesn’t take long for her to begin suspecting foul play.

While Western horror tales are dominated by haunted houses, in South Korea it is the block of flats that reigns supreme. Supernatural stories set in homes often revolve around dark family secrets that manifest themselves in horrific ways, but Korean apartment horrors are generally more concerned with the danger that lies just outside the door than within.

On the high-budget end of the spectrum, that danger beyond the door can be monsters (Sweet Home) and zombies (Happiness), but equally effective and certainly more realistic, and thus relatable, are the stalkers, kidnappers, rapists, dog killers and murderers that might live next door, in modern classics like Barking Dogs Never Bite, Possessed and Hide and Seek.

What all these stories also share in common is a disdain for the selfish and insular communities that apartment blocks can create.