Director: Byun Seungmin
TIFF Presentation: Primetime
Country: South Korea
Year: 2023
Runtime: 101 minutes
Language: Korean
Cast: Jin Sun-kyu, Jun Jong-seo, Chang Ryul
Based on Lee Chung-hyun’s award-winning short film, also titled Bargain, this action-packed series is about the aftermath of an earthquake hitting an auction house for an organ trafficking operation, leaving the buyers and sellers scrambling to survive.
The team that did the short film, which also premiered at TIFF 2016, are able to expand the story for television series. TIFF viewers were treated to a few episodes that definitely left us on a cliffhanger – pun intended.
Bargain starts off by getting you thinking about sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and socio-economic disparity all before the earthquake even hits. What follows is a very claustrophobic and high-octane search for survival that’ll leave you wanting to binge all the way through and with each episode a little over half an hour, it’s very easy to keep watching the whole way through.
Watch This If: Missing Squid Games.
★★★★
Bargain is streaming on Paramount+ beginning Thursday, October 5, 2023. Stream with Apple TV+.
