'The Victim's Game' Review: Taiwanese drama is a gripping tale about murder, suicide and guilty intentions
Spoilers for 'The Victim's Game'
'The Victim's Game' doesn't move fast, but the twists in the plot are served so nonchalantly as if a group of individuals helping each other commit suicide was nothing to be surprised about. This treatment extends to other parts of the plot as well.
We realize towards the end of the show that this treatment was necessary to ensure that the audience understands the intentions of every victim they meet through the show. For instance, the manner in which lead character Fang Yi-jen (Joseph Chang), a forensic expert with Asperger's Syndrome, is bullied at the workplace is not taken lightly but is accepted as the norm.
Then we have this journalist Hsu Hai-yin (Tiffany Hsu), who has no qualms about pulling all kinds of strings to get her news scoops. She uses information about a cop being a gambler to get him to spill confidential details about cases, and once she figures out that Yi-jen's daughter Hsiao Meng could in some way be involved in the recent serial murder case, she uses him to give confidential details about her as well.
The two begin to investigate the case on the side, without the knowledge of the detective in charge of the investigation Zhao Cheng Kuan (Jason Wang).
Does Yi-jen feel guilty about keeping the truth from the detective a secret? He doesn't. In fact, there comes a time when one of the victims could attempt suicide by jumping on to the tracks on the subway. When Hai-yin suggests that they call the cops, Yi-jen refuses because he believes that his daughter could be at the subway station. So even when life was on the line, he wasn't conflicted. It is only after Hai-yin brings up the fact that he went overboard does he think twice.
Even then, we don't see him feeling guilty, but it is more a sense of resignation.
One of the victims — Hao — is a trans person who was born a male and the amount of bullying that he has to face at work, and amid family is also portrayed in the same manner. So when we do see her take her own life, by submerging herself in acid, the extreme action makes sense. She has buried all the years of resentment, the years of hatred that she had to face along with herself.
Every victim's death that unfolds after Hao's gives us a clue as to how harshly they were treated by the society, the hardships that they had to go through without any sense of empathy because, if any of them had had that one person to depend on, who understood them and supported them; they might not have taken such a drastic step after all.
The show, in addition, portrays the chain of these events initially as a case of serial murder. Then after Yi-jen and Hai-yin investigate, they find out that each victim had committed suicide in return for their last wish to be fulfilled. Starting from Hao who wanted to be acknowledged as a woman to Yi-jen's daughter Hsiao Meng whose last wish is to fulfill her mother's last wish.
Then it isn't until the very end do we learn about Li Ya-jun (Ruby Lin) who perpetrated everything. She was mentally affected after she watched the man she loved to endure torture for trying to call out the nursing home that he is at for malpractice. She believes that to help him would be to free him from the shackles of life and that's where everything begins.
She "assists" others fulfill their wishes and break the shackles that hold them back to life. She even pushes Hsiao Meng to remove her mother from life support claiming that this would save her mother from all the suffering. Hsiao Meng who is already vulnerable in the absence of her father or anyone else to support her decides that letting her mother go would be the best option, but after she does this, she begins to suffer from the guilt of not being able to make her mother's last wish come true.
This is what Ya-jun uses to control Hsiao Meng and ends up planning the entire "assisted" suicide plan. Ya-jun truly believes that she did the world and the people a lot of good by helping others die because she claims to understand their pain. She has heard of their struggles and has empathized with them when no one else would, so the victims considered her a friend and confidante.
This relationship gets manipulated to serve Ya-jun's purpose. She uses each of them to fulfill a void that Ya-jun feels within herself and the show ends with her matter-of-fact confession that she is not a killer, but a savior.
All 8 episodes of 'The Victim's Game' can be streamed on Netflix.
