@joelkeller Published March 2, 2026, 5:30 p.m. ET Where to Stream: Siren's Kiss Powered by Reelgood More On: Korean Dramas ‘The Art of Sarah’ Ending Explained: “Who Are You?” Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Art Of Sarah’ On Netflix, Where A Woman Fakes Her Way To A Luxurious Life, And A Police Detective Uncovers Her Lies 14 Romantic K-Dramas To Watch This Valentine’s Day 11 Best New Shows on Netflix: February 2026’s Top Upcoming Series to Watch Siren’s Kiss, a new Korean thriller on Prime Video, touts that it’s a romance along with being a thriller. Sometimes that works, but we’re not sure about the way the romance part of this story is going to fit in, given what we saw in the first episode.
Opening Shot: We’re shown a smelting factory. In a side room, a man is numbing his hand in liquid nitrogen, with the idea that he’s going to cut his fingers off with a circular saw.
The Gist: The man is going to cut his fingers off as part of a false insurance claim. The man who arranged the claim — and paid the man to cut his fingers off — is getting a shave when Cha Woo-seok (Wi Ha-joon), an insurance investigator for the Nonghyup Life Insurance company, enters. A fight ensues, but Cha prevails.
Cha used to be a cop, and when he gets a case, he tends to not let go until he feels justice is served, like when he sees that a little girl whose claim he investigated a year prior is injured again, this time even more severely. He knows her mother is responsible, and vows to the woman that he’ll peg these “accidents” on her eventually.
In the meantime, at Royal Auctions, chief auctioneer Han Seol-ah (Park Min-young) knows her business, as we see when she identifies a fake painting right before an auction. But she’s facing a challenge from the associate auctioneer, Kim Yoon-ji (Lee Elijah). It seems that Kim knows some of Han’s secrets and she’s going to use them to get Han’s job.
Kim calls Cha Woo-seok to report a murder that took place for a false insurance claim, and Cha takes his friend, police detective Gong Ju-yeong (Gong Seong-ha), to talk to her. But just as they reach the Royal Auctions building, Kim smashes against a glass awning, dead from a multi-story fall.
While Gong’s boss, Detective Pyo Seong-il (Hong Ki-joon), doesn’t want Cha involved, mostly for personal reasons, Gong clues him in on some info while he does his own investigation. He finds out about Kim wanting Han’s job, and his focus turns to her, especially when she finds out that her fiancé died died ten days earlier, just after he canceled a life insurance policy where Han was the beneficiary.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Siren’s Kiss is a thriller along the lines of The Frog, though there seems to be a quasi-romantic aspect mixed into the cat-and-mouse game.
Our Take: Siren’s Kiss presents what’s essentially a cat-and-mouse game between Han Seol-ah and Cha Woo-seok, While the first episode does a good job of setting up who these two people are who are going to be formidable adversaries, it doesn’t approach the major plot point to come.
Cha is going to find out that three of Han’s previous fiancés all died suspiciously, so he’s going to somehow enter into a fake relationship with Han — with her consent! — in order to see if she’s the reason why they all died. We’re not sure of what the reasoning is going to be on Cha’s part, and why proposing this plan to Han isn’t going to tip her off that he’s on to her.
The first episode seemingly gave us enough about the two main characters — with the usual slow-moving atmospheric scenes endemic in K-dramas mixed in — to make for a good thriller. What we wonder if the “fake romance” part of this story is going to lead to a real romance, and just how the show’s writers are going to finesse it into place, given that Cha thinks Han has murdered multiple people, including Kim.
Performance Worth Watching: Park Min-young is cool and calculating as Han Seol-ah, but when she shakily goes for some tranquilizers after talking to the police about Kim, we believe that cool facade is about to crack.
Parting Shot: As Cha confronts Han, we flash back to the night Kim died, and see who might have pushed her to her death.
Sleeper Star: Kim Jung-hyun plays Paek Jun-beom, a client of Han’s that might have something to do with one of the previous fiancé deaths.
Most Pilot-y Line: An extended scene where Cha observes Han from the other side of what Han thinks is a mirror takes far too long to play out.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Siren’s Kiss could have used the 68-minute runtime of its first episode to get a little deeper into the story, but we do know a good deal about the main characters and what the stakes are in this thriller.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
