Masked killers, people forced to gamble for their lives and a high-altitude police chase. Asia surprises again on Netflix with ‘Copycat Killer’.
Netflix has its ups and downs and the truth is that the sheer number of series coming to Netflix makes it hard to risk watching anything. Most go unnoticed because they should go unnoticed, but there are always gems that slip away. It is also a phenomenon that has a counterpart, that of giving it to reproduce in something almost random, that you have found, and making a small great discovery. Even so, it is always good to explore with some knowledge, and a good option is to look for what to see among the huge amount of content, limiting ourselves to a genre that we know we like. And if Netflix has done something historically well, it’s because of its love of serial killer thrillers. We are here to discover ‘The media assassin’, a series that should not take long to enter our list of the best Netflix serial killer series.
Asian police thriller, serial killer with a mask that looks like the brother of the doll from ‘The Squid Game’, gore games a la ‘Saw’ and a critique of media attention taken from ‘Black Mirror’. Those are the master ingredients of a Netflix series that is very easy to get hooked on if we get over (which we should have got over by now) the fact that it is a Taiwanese (or Chinese, depending on who you ask) television fiction. But if we are already habitually hooked on Korean and Japanese series, we hope that this is not an excuse.
Directed by Henri Chang and Chang Jung-Chi and scripted by Miyuki Miyabe (yes, the scriptwriter is Japanese), the series focuses on various aspects of the murders. Basically, if in ‘Saw’ the games were in private environments and in The Squid Game they were held on an island for the enjoyment of the elites, here the trick (for the murderer at least) is to display the evidence of it for the whole world . Using television not only to show his sadistic experiments but also to mislead and pressure a stressed-out police officer, the key to The Media Assassin lies in the series title itself. And this has made us wonder precisely if we are actually playing the game of the series itself. Serial killers have become key figures in television entertainment around the world.
The media assassin is a tense thriller, full of surprises throughout its 10 episodes. It also has a high level of production both in its action sequences and in its settings, with careful scenery and a dark production design. But it is also important for being one of the last chapters to bring together what ‘Saw’, ‘The Squid Game’ or even the latest ‘The Batman’ have already started. Something that was already in ‘Mindhunter’ and ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’. No one deserves to be forced to play a sadistic game for their life, but we have done something wrong as a society when the center of our entertainment is serial killers.
Source: Fotogramas

Rose James is a Gossipify movie and series reviewer known for her in-depth analysis and unique perspective on the latest releases. With a background in film studies, she provides engaging and informative reviews, and keeps readers up to date with industry trends and emerging talents.