Directed by: Park Young Seo
Cast: Kang Mi Na, Baek Sun Ho, Hyun Woo Seok, and Lee Hyo Je
Rating: ★★★
Though no bigger than the palm of your hand, a smartphone quietly governs nearly every aspect of our lives. But when it begins to dictate your fate—pulling you into a vortex of the unknown with fatal consequences—you realise you are up against an adversary like no other.
If Wishes Could Kill, Netflix’s latest teen horror K-drama, brings this chilling premise to life. However dystopian it may seem, the show taps into a very real unease: screens already dominate our day-to-day existence. So how dangerous could a seemingly harmless wish-granting app really be?
What is the story of If Wishes Could Kill?
Five students are introduced to “Girigo” by their classmate Hyeon Wook (Lee Hyo Je), who credits the app for helping him ace a maths test. Its mechanism is deceptively simple—download the app, enter your name and birth date, repeat your wish earnestly, and it’s granted.
Se Ah (Joon So Young) and Kim Geon Woo (Baek Sun Ho)—secretly dating track teammates—along with the brilliant Kang Ha Joon (Hyun Woo Seok) and the aloof Na Ri (Kang Mi Na), dismiss the claim as mystical nonsense. Still, when Hyeon Wook shares the link, curiosity wins. What harm could one app do?
The answer arrives swiftly—and violently. Soon after, Hyeon Wook, as if possessed, slits his throat in broad daylight at school.
Se Ah soon uncovers the app’s horrifying rule: once a wish is granted, a 24-hour countdown begins. When it hits zero, death follows—gruesome and inevitable. The app exploits insecurities too, sending phantom texts and hoax calls that fracture trust within the group.
Geon Woo becomes the next to test it, making an innocuous wish to cancel Se Ah’s track training. It comes true—and so does the countdown. The only way to stop it? Pass the curse on by making someone else wish. Like a sinister chain letter, the app feeds on fear and compulsion.
As Geon Woo spirals under an unseen force, Se Ah is forced to act. To save him, she must make a wish of her own. Meanwhile, Na Ri—harbouring feelings for Geon Woo—sees an opportunity to drive a wedge between the couple, her resentment toward Se Ah simmering beneath the surface.
With friendships fracturing, Ha Joon attempts to delete the app using his programming skills. When logic fails, he turns to his estranged sister and her eccentric husband—both shamans—for help.
But Girigo is no ordinary program. It is controlled by an entity far more powerful than code.
The app’s origins trace back to a tragedy within the same school. Si Won, a tech prodigy ashamed of her shamanic lineage, creates the app and—at her friends’ urging—infuses it with elements of shamanism. In a moment of betrayal, she uses it against her best friend, who curses her to die. As a bloodied Si Won falls to her death, she makes one final wish—imbuing Girigo with uncontrollable power. Her vengeful spirit now lures users into its deadly game.
Back in the present, the students are pushed to a brutal crossroads: to survive, one of them must die.
The Verdict
If Wishes Could Kill deftly blends Korean mysticism with a technological nightmare. Shamans—long a part of Korean cultural life despite modern prejudice—are reimagined here as powerful intermediaries, capable of battling forces that exist beyond the tangible, even within the digital realm.
For a generation that has never known life without smartphones, the show poses an unsettling question: how much of reality is already being shaped—or distorted—by the screens we trust so blindly? With frequent headlines around phone addiction and its consequences, If Wishes Could Kill taps into the fear—and the strange resonance—of the unseen and the unknown, where the line between the real and the imagined begins to blur.