[Review] YOUNG POSSE’s “COLD” music video is a dark tale of revenge that lingers with the viewer

YOUNG POSSE‘s latest comeback with “COLD” is notable for many reasons, the most obvious being the sharp change in directions for both their concept and sound (at least for this comeback). However, it was their melodramatic music video for the song that really grabbed my attention and ended up being most intriguing.

Directed by Remii Huang and starring actor Tseng Jing Hua, the music video unfolds non-linearly and tackles dark issues like revenge, abandonment, objectification, bullying, and suicide. The tone and settings are nicely setup, and there are some truly inspired shots within it.

One standout shot in particular was the representation of a suicide as a falling bird in the background of Yeonjung recording. And I also thought a lot of the framing choices for the shots were effective at conveying dialogue without speaking, if that makes sense.

Backtracking a bit, to summarize the plot, Jing Hua and member Yeonjung are siblings whose father cruelly abandoned their mother and them when they were children (I inferred their mother died due to the locket shot, perhaps by suicide). By chance, Yeonjung sees her father with his new lover and family, including classmate (and fellow member) Doeun, who plays his other daughter. Yeonjung then runs to Jing Hua’s studio and ends up at his door in tears, which is when the revenge plan hatches.

Their friend group stages an attack on Doeun, and Jing Hua steps in as the knight in shining armor to save her, which results in the two of them getting closer in his photo studio (and maybe dating?). However, Jing Hua breaks her heart and humiliates her by posting something related to deepfakes or private intimate photos online. The resulting harassment and humiliation is severe enough to result in Doeun jumping off a building, and Yeonjung is there to film the moment Doeun takes her life. While Yeonjung hesitates to send the video to their father, Jing Hua steps in and completes the revenge.

——

Now if you read all that and are a bit confused as to how the people taking revenge are the ones you should root for, then you’re not alone. If the intent of this was to be a morality play where there’s a good and bad side, then I don’t think it’s an effective one. And if it’s meant to be a Hamlet-esque tragedy — which the teasers allude to (on the chalkboard) — then it would’ve been more appropriate to have more or all of the main characters end up dead somehow as a result of the revenge plot.

Instead, for the most part everybody sucks and it ends with perhaps the only two potentially innocent people (their mom and Doeun’s character) probably dying by their own hands. Goddamn people suck and the choices they make are hard to redeem … which might be the lesson here.

Perhaps I’m being charitable due to the limited time of the medium, but my interpretation of the “COLD” music video was that everybody being morally compromised was indeed the point.

The music video concludes with a scene that doesn’t show the siblings necessarily pleased or satisfied with the completed revenge, but rather somewhat shaken and pensive about what they did and what the road to revenge has turned them into. They’re now … cold, one could say.

Whoever battles monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

It’s kind of like all the tropes about being wary of seeking revenge, and the siblings end up now having to live with the demons they’ll see every day looking back in the mirror, the ones Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote warns of.

——

Obviously it’s not as fleshed-out and developed as you’d like this kind of topic to be — especially with regards to things like what it says that their revenge plan counted on society to do its thing via slut-shaming, misogyny, and voyeurism to work — but it’s about as good as you could probably get in six minutes.

Honestly, I understand any dissenting takes about the subject matter as well since that was my initial reaction to it after understanding the plot. However, it definitely excel at telling an engaging story, one that makes you think and stayed with me a bit to ponder, which is a ton more than I can say for almost every other K-pop music video. I appreciate and value that aspect of this at least.