The Glory Review

Kim Eun-sook, who wrote Descendants of the Sun, built The Glory for Netflix as a sixteen-episode revenge plan released in two parts. In 2004 Moon Dong-eun is tortured by a clique of rich classmates, burned with a hot hair iron while teachers and police look away. She drops out, waits, and returns years later as the homeroom teacher of the ringleader's daughter.

Song Hye-kyo, the romantic lead of that earlier hit, plays the adult Dong-eun almost without expression, and the coldness is frightening. Lim Ji-yeon matches her as Park Yeon-jin, a weather presenter who never stopped being a bully; both won Baeksang awards, as did the series. Yeom Hye-ran, as a battered housekeeper who becomes Dong-eun's accomplice, supplies the warmth and most of the laughs. Part 1 moves with the patience of the Go games Dong-eun plays with Yeon-jin's unsuspecting husband: every scene places a stone.

Part 2 is less disciplined. The villains destroy one another so obligingly that the plan looks like luck, a shaman subplot tips into the supernatural, and Kim's taste for aphorism gets the better of the dialogue. Ahn Gil-ho's direction is polished rather than striking. The anger at its centre is real, and at home the show was praised for dragging school violence into the light.