If Wishes Could Kill S1E01 Review: A cursed app crashes the friend group before lunch
Netflix's high school chiller opens like a group chat joke that keeps mutating until someone is holding a blade.
If Wishes Could Kill begins with a dead-serious dare: write down your saju, make a wish, and mean it hard enough for the universe to answer. The premiere knows that every friend group has a tiny courtroom inside it, where jokes become verdicts and loyalty can flip in one sentence. Its horror lives in that shift. Before anyone has time to process whether Girigo is an app, a curse, or a cosmic spam link, the kids of Class 2-4 have already done the most dangerous thing teenagers can do: tell the truth around the wrong person.
The prologue makes every joke feel dangerous
The opening flashback is blunt in the best nasty way. In March 2005, Do Hye-ryung records a wish for “all of you to die,” and the scene refuses to soften the ugliness of that sentence. No elaborate demon lore arrives to cushion it. A girl looks at unseen people who have clearly pushed her past every guardrail, follows the saju ritual, and names death as the thing she wants most. That is the show planting its flag: the supernatural may be real, but the first monster is humiliation.
Then the premiere jumps to Thursday, June 12, and the tone swerves into bright, chaotic teen comedy. Yoo Se-ah wakes up late, bolts through her apartment hallway, gets lightly scolded by a neighbor, and still makes space for the tiny thrill of having Kim Geon-woo waiting near school. Their relationship is not public, but it is not exactly subtle either. Se-ah gets to class early, Geon-woo usually slides in late, and suddenly they are arriving together. If Wishes Could Kill gets a lot of mileage from that very normal suspicious math.
The friend group dynamic is immediately legible. Lim Na-ri notices everything, especially anything that might involve Geon-woo. She performs confidence like a full-time job, tossing insults at Hyeong-wook and denying vulnerability so quickly that the denial has fingerprints on it. Kang Ha-joon is the resident logic machine, already irritated before the day has properly started. Choi Hyeong-wook is the loud otaku friend everyone claims to tolerate until the room gives them permission to say the meaner version out loud. The episode is sharp about how cruelty gets laundered as banter. One minute Hyeong-wook is being annoying; the next, everyone has accepted that he is the safe target.
That is why the math-score reveal works better than a bigger scare would have. The teacher announces that Class 2-4 placed first in the city and only four students got perfect scores. Ha-joon being one of them makes sense to everyone. Hyeong-wook being the other makes the room glitch. The class jumps to cheating before he can breathe, and even his friends treat the news like an accusation. Hyeong-wook, cornered and desperate to be believed, introduces Girigo.
The app is wonderfully tacky in concept and creepy in execution. You cannot search for it normally. You need a one-time link. It turns on the camera. It asks you to write your name and birth date on paper, hold it to the screen, record the wish, and send it. The rules sound like playground occultism updated for kids who have never been offline. The saju detail gives the ritual a cultural weight, while the phone interface keeps it from feeling antique. It is old fear wearing a cheap app icon.
Hyeong-wook’s proof is also painfully perfect: he wished for a perfect math score. Not money, revenge, popularity, or romance. Just one academic win that might make his family proud for once. Everyone laughs because the wish is small. The premiere asks us to notice that small does not mean unserious. For Hyeong-wook, that score is proof he can be more than the class mascot for secondhand embarrassment.
Se-ah and Geon-woo give the show a pulse
Se-ah is the premiere’s most immediately charming creation because she is brave in a way that feels physical before it feels moral. During training, she tells Geon-woo to clear his mind before a jump, then admits that she personally just goes for it. That tiny exchange says a lot. Se-ah does not overthink danger; she sprints at it and trusts her body to solve the rest. Her invitation to the national reserve team lands as earned happiness, not random plot candy, because the episode has already shown us the athlete inside the messy schoolgirl.
Geon-woo, meanwhile, is quieter and more anxious. He freezes at the sandpit. The coach calls out the same foul that got him disqualified last year. He can fly off the mat and still bail when it counts, which makes him a nice emotional counterweight to Se-ah’s forward momentum. Their romance has a sweet, unserious texture: stolen hallway calls, chicken after practice, mutual teasing about the coach knowing they are dating. The show lets them be cute without turning them into cotton candy.
That matters because Girigo enters their romance as a joke before it becomes a threat. After Se-ah learns that weekend training may wreck her social life, Geon-woo grabs the app and records a wish for her training to be canceled. Se-ah tells him to stop, then laughs along when he chants “Training is canceled!” like a kid trying to summon a snow day. In a weaker premiere, this would feel like a dumb decision inserted to move the curse along. Here, it feels exactly dumb enough to be human. They have just watched Hyeong-wook get a perfect score after using the app, but belief has not caught up with evidence. Their brains are still filing Girigo under weird prank, not blood contract.
The episode keeps cutting that sweetness with a darker domestic loneliness. Se-ah’s aunt, Ji-sun, is always pulled away by hospital duty. When Se-ah texts that she made the national reserve team, the reply is affectionate but absent: congratulations, order food with the card, she will not be home. Se-ah celebrates with Geon-woo because he is the person available. The romance is not only romance; it is shelter.
That shelter also lets the show make Na-ri more complicated without excusing her. Na-ri is vicious about Hyeong-wook, calling him pathetic, embarrassing, smelly, boring, and worse. She worries about her weight before going out, wants to know what Geon-woo will wear, and keeps needling Se-ah as if affection were a competition she cannot admit she is losing. Later, she goes drinking with other girls, uses a fake ID image, and vanishes from homeroom the next morning. The premiere does not turn her absence into a solved mystery yet. It leaves her as a live wire: mean, insecure, and now missing from the room where consequences are starting to gather.
The arbiter stays scarier at the edge of the frame
The supernatural side of the premiere is smartly underplayed. The briefest, strangest scene comes away from school, when two figures sense that “a guest” is coming. One asks whether the guest is good or bad, then says “Haetsal?” The other cannot see what kind of guest they are dealing with and wonders whether to get a knife. That is the episode’s one real peek past Girigo’s interface, and it works because it does not explain itself to death. Haetsal is not introduced through lore dump lighting and a giant rulebook. The name arrives like a chill in a house where people already know the old dangers are real.
That restraint helps the final classroom sequence hit harder. By then, the emotional facts are already loaded. Hyeong-wook has heard enough to know how his friends talk when he is not supposed to hear. Se-ah missed his calls. Geon-woo chose the party but also could not protect him from the larger wound. Na-ri is absent. Ha-joon has gone from dismissive skeptic to someone who has reason to wonder whether the app did exactly what it promised.
Hyeong-wook arrives at school wrong. At first, everyone reads it as sleeping, sulking, or another bit. Then his body jolts, panic spreads, and the room loses its social script. The teacher tries to control the situation. Geon-woo moves toward him because that is what Geon-woo does. Hyeong-wook grabs a blade, nearly hurts Geon-woo, screams at everyone to get away, and then turns the violence inward while his friends beg him to stop.
It is a brutal climax, and the premiere mostly earns the shock because it has spent the hour making Hyeong-wook’s pain visible under the clowning. His wish was not random. His birthday mattered. His need to be seen was embarrassing, needy, and very real. The scene does not ask viewers to pretend he was secretly cool all along. It asks something more uncomfortable: how many times can a group call someone pathetic before the word starts to behave like a curse?
There is still a slight bluntness to the final stretch. The horror escalation is effective, but the episode piles a lot into one school day: secret dating, national-team news, Girigo’s rules, Na-ri’s night out, Hyeong-wook’s spiral, and the Haetsal tease. The density gives the premiere a binge-friendly snap, though it also means Ha-joon and Na-ri sometimes feel sketched in by function rather than fully opened up. Ha-joon is the skeptic. Na-ri is the queen bee with cracks. Both are compelling lanes, but the next episode needs to deepen them fast.
What this hour costs
The premiere says wishing is less dangerous than meaning it. Girigo does not appear to reward casual noise. It asks for name, birth date, camera, voice, and sincerity. That makes every ugly sentence feel newly hazardous. Na-ri can say she hates Hyeong-wook and move on. Do Hye-ryung can wish death on her tormentors and the show frames that as a long shadow. Geon-woo can play around with Se-ah’s training schedule and accidentally join the same ritual chain. The app is scary because it treats teenage intensity as legally binding.
It also says friendship can become a haunted place before anything supernatural shows up. The group knows one another’s patterns, crushes, weaknesses, and jokes. That intimacy should protect them. Instead, it gives them better aim. By the time Hyeong-wook says “I’m a loser,” the horror has already happened in pieces: every laugh, every dismissal, every unanswered call, every moment where kindness arrived late.
Verdict
If Wishes Could Kill opens with a confident blend of school comedy and curse horror, and its best move is refusing to separate the two. The jokes are funny until they curdle. The romance is sweet until it brushes against ritual danger. The app is silly until the wish comes due. As a premiere, it has the glossy Netflix pace, the group-chat bite, and enough emotional damage under the hood to make its cliffhanger sting.
The episode is not flawless. Some character lanes are still broad, and the supernatural mythology is more intriguing than clear. But the hour knows exactly where to press: Hyeong-wook’s humiliation, Se-ah and Geon-woo’s tenderness, Na-ri’s brittle performance of power, and the awful possibility that words said for drama may still count. For a horror-edged K-drama about kids who should absolutely stop recording wishes into cursed apps, that is a strong start.
Rating: 8.5/10