SPOILERS

On a rainy night a bus suffers a mechanical error and goes careening off a bridge into the river below. The driver and the passengers on that bus wake from unconsciousness to a city of perpetual night. Only a very few of the people on that bus realize where they have been taken.

I rewatched Light Shop recently. I was in the mood for something haunting and thought provoking but nothing on the multitude of streaming services that I’m subscribed to caught my attention. Then I saw the thumbnail for Light Shop and hoped that it would be as satisfying the second time as it was the first.

It was.

Light Shop is a Korean horror mystery series streaming on Hulu/Disney+ that is totally rewatchable if you are looking for a thoughtful ghost story with emotional depth. The story is set in the liminal space between life and death. Liminal not Limbo. I Googled it. “Liminal” is the space between two planes. “Limbo” being one of those planes.

In Light Shop the characters are in the transitional liminal space and must make the decision to either commit to the living plane or venture to the plane beyond. The eponymous light shop is the focal point of this space. Everyone stops in to choose a bulb. Choosing their bulb, the one that contains their soul, means they have chosen to return to the living plane. Breaking their bulb means they have chosen to remain in liminal space which now becomes limbo. It’s never shown but can be assumed that if the bulb burns out, they die and transition into the plane beyond.

Viewers are told in Episode 4 that once preparations for burial begin the deceased have three days to linger and say goodbye. It’s Episode 4 that makes sense of the preceding episodes. It explains the plot. Passengers on the ill-fated bus are comatose, repeating benign routines in a city of perpetual night until they either wake to the living plane or pass on to the one beyond. Before Episode 4 Light Shop seemed like was going to be an anthology of horror stories like Rod Sterling’s Night Gallery (his darker, spookier Twilight Zone) where the paintings (the stories) are all hung in the same darkened space of the “night gallery.”

The rules of Light Shop’s liminal space are given over several episodes starting with 4. They are related through training instructions a coroner gives his new assistant. For example, she is startled by groans coming from a body she is cleaning. She panics and anxiously says, “the corpse is still alive.” The coroner admonishes her, “the body is deceased, not a corpse” and “the dead are still people.” He tells her that the groans are from the body releasing gases and instructs her to apologize to the deceased before she leaves.  

Episode 6 begins with the coroner and his assistant sliding a new body into its locker in the morgue. His assistant notices rope burns around her neck and remarks that the deceased must have been in a lot of pain. The coroner responds by explaining this is why they clean and shroud the body. It’s to hide the things that might remind the deceased of their pain in life. This is also when he explains the purpose of a three-day wake. Later in the episode, when it’s time to remove the body from its locker so it can be cleaned and shrouded the locker door is jammed. The coroner and his assistant cannot open it. After a few tugs on the handle, the coroner says that the ghost must be resentful and tells his assistant they’ll “give her time.” It’s the body of Ji-young.

Ji-young and Hyun-min are the first two characters we meet in Light Shop. The series starts with a then unnamed Ji-young, a gloomy young woman with long black locks and a long white dress sitting at a bust stop at night. A bus pulls into the stop and a bespectacled young man, Hyun-min, gets off. He notices her. Stops. But then just walks away. The scene repeats itself but this time he attempts to speak with her before walking away.

It’s raining heavily the third time. This time she invites herself over to his apartment. Inside, the door closes mysteriously behind her and she asks him to leave the lights off. In his dimly lit apartment he notices that her fingertips are backwards. Her nails are where her pads should be! She opens her suitcase to reveal a pair of large scissors and a series of other pointed instruments. The scene ends. The credits roll as she is leaving the apartment with her suitcase wheeling behind her.

There are nine individual stories in Light Shop. Each told in varying degrees of detail. Ji-young and Hyun-min’s is my favorite. It conjures up feelings of gothic fiction for me. Young lovers who struggle to remain together despite his mother’s disapproval. A tragic accident befalling the young man while on his way to propose to her. His wrathful mother blaming her for his death, causing her to hang herself. And then as her life slips away from her a repentant confession that she lied – the mother’s son, the hanging woman’s lover, is still alive. Both he and her ghost, tormented by his inability to remember her.

By Light Shop’s end, Hyun-min is broken emotionally and physically. In the end, Ji-young was unable to save his spine. It’s revealed that those pointed instruments were not used to kill him but to sew him back together whenever he collapsed. He needs a wheelchair to get around now. He has “delirium.” He sees ghosts. Most ICU patients get it and most learn to deal with it. Hyun-min disheveled in appearance and emotionally fragile has not.

The final scene depicts him at his front door unable to remember his apartment PIN. The hallway lights go off. They must be motion sensitive. He waves one hand in the air to reactivate the lights. We’re shown a memory of him waving to Ji-young to get her attention. When the lights return Ji-young is hanging by her neck above him. She says she will follow him.

There is still so much more to discover about Ji-young and Hyun-min that Kang Full might devote an entire mini-series to solving the mysterious loss of his memory. And while we’re wondering, what happened to the ring? If her spirit follows him will she eventually become malevolent (frustrated by his ongoing inability to remember or angry that he has moved on without remembering her)?

Rewatching Light Shop helped me appreciate the subtlety of the writing and the foretelling of events. Hyun-min forgets the bouquet and gift he bought Ji-young on the train. The series ended with what I assumed was the start of new arcs for some of the characters. The story of the schoolgirl, Hyun-joo, and the post credit scene in the last episode hinted at a second season. I Googled it but nothing has been confirmed.