Mezzala – The Rashomon Effect: Cinematic Technique In Mystery Thriller Dark Comedy K-Drama The Affair Was Just the Beginning Kim Hye-Soo’s South Korean Black Comedy Television Series. Have you ever watched a story told several times over, with each retelling feeling different despite covering the very same event? That is the essence of the Rashomon Effect a narrative technique more than seventy years old that now underpins the most talked-about South Korean Drama of August 2026: The Affair Was Just the Beginning, starring Kim Hye-Soo, with six of its eight episodes having aired by mid-August on Coupang Play, VIU, Viki.
The 2026 South Korean dark comedy-thriller series The Affair Was Just the Beginning (2026) employs a multi-perspective narrative style reminiscent of the Rashomon effect; the series presents a story that initially appears to be a case of marital infidelity but quickly escalates into amateur criminal activity and a chain of unfortunate events involving a hit-and-run, murder, blackmail, and attempts at a cover-up. Fragmented conversations, erratic behavior, and misinformation fuel suspicion, as each character harbors their own hidden motives.
Table of Contents
Read Also: Korean Tv Series Drama Korea The Affair Was Just The Beginning (2026)
What Is the Rashomon Effect? Cinematic Technique In Mystery Thriller Dark Comedy Film
The Rashomon Effect is a storytelling technique in which a single event is retold from the perspectives of several different characters, with each version contradicting the others. This is not because anyone is deliberately lying, but because human memory is naturally distorted by ego, fear and the instinct to protect one’s self-image. The term has since travelled well beyond cinema psychology uses it to describe memory bias, while the field of law uses it to describe conflicting eyewitness testimony about the very same event.
The technique takes its name from the film Rashomon (1950), directed by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa did not invent this structure from scratch he adapted two short stories by the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: the film’s title comes from the setting of an old city gate in the short story “Rashōmon”, while the core plot of clashing testimonies is drawn from the 1922 short story “In a Grove”.
The story centres on the murder of a samurai and the assault of his wife in a forest, recounted through four conflicting testimonies: the accused bandit, the wife herself, the samurai’s spirit speaking through a medium, and a woodcutter who witnessed events from a distance. No single version fully aligns with the others, and the film deliberately never offers a definitive answer as to who is telling the truth. Kurosawa’s greatest achievement was translating that literary structure into cinematic visual language through camera movement and the striking contrast of sunlight filtering through the forest canopy a lighting technique still studied in film schools today. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice and an Academy Honorary Award, propelling its name beyond the title of a single film into a term used across multiple disciplines.
Films That Used The Rashomon Effect
There is a fundamental distinction between the classic version of the Rashomon Effect and the adaptation more commonly employed by Hollywood and European cinema. In the classic form, the objective truth is deliberately left ambiguous and is never resolved — every narrator is an unreliable one, their memory distorted by ego and self-preservation. In the modified form, the multi-perspective technique is used to build a puzzle, but the film’s final act still delivers a clear, objective truth, closer to a conventional whodunit structure.
Examples of this technique on the big screen are wide-ranging. Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021) splits the film into three chapters of testimony, but firmly establishes the female victim’s perspective as the absolute truth in the final act. Gone Girl (2014) modifies the formula through two chapters of conflicting perception surrounding the mystery of a missing wife. There is also Vantage Point (2008), which replays the same 23-minute span of a fictional presidential assassination attempt from eight different points of view. In South Korea, meanwhile, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) is regarded as one of the purest applications of the Rashomon Effect — replaying the exact same timeline from Sook-hee’s perspective in the first chapter, then from Lady Hideko’s in the next, entirely overturning the audience’s assumptions.
Interestingly, not every popular mystery film that is thought to use this technique actually does. In Knives Out (2019), for instance, the conflicting testimonies of the Thrombey family arise because they are deliberately lying, not because of any distortion of memory — making it more accurate to call this a “reverse Rashomon Effect”. Likewise, Prisoners (2013) is, in fact, told in a linear, chronological fashion, with the audience’s confusion stemming purely from the characters’ trauma rather than a layered, multi-perspective narrative structure. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is also frequently mentioned alongside Rashomon, though it technically employs a different approach: voyeurism from a single, fixed vantage point, rather than the repetition of one event across multiple points of view.
K-Drama The Affair Was Just the Beginning (2026): A Full Profile of Kim Hye-Soo’s Black Comedy Drama
K-Drama The Affair Was Just the Beginning premiered on 31 July 2026 on Coupang Play, and is also available on VIU and Viki for international audiences. Its original title, 지금 불륜이 문제가 아닙니다, literally translates as “Right Now, the Affair Isn’t the Problem” — a hint that the central conflict of the story runs far deeper than a simple case of marital infidelity.
| Aspect | Detail K-Drama The Affair Was Just the Beginning (2026) |
|---|---|
| Original title | 지금 불륜이 문제가 아닙니다 (Jigeumeun Bulryuni Munjega Animmida) |
| Director | Lee Chang-hee (known for Strangers from Hell and A Killer Paradox) |
| Screenwriters | Jung Eun-kyung & Park Soo-rin |
| Production house | Firstman Studio, founded by Hwang Dong-hyuk (director of Squid Game) |
| Broadcast platforms | Coupang Play (South Korea) · VIU & Viki (International) |
| Number of episodes | 8 episodes, released in 2 eps each Friday |
| Premiere date | 31 July 2026, Friday, 20:00 KST |
| Genre | Black comedy · Mystery · Thriller · Twist-laden Family Drama |
| Main cast | Kim Hye-Soo (Park Kyung-hee) Kim Ji-hoon (Lim Jae-hong) Cho Yeo-jeong (Ahn Soo-jung) Kim Jae-chul (Joo Bo-sung) Jeon Si-hyun (Lim Ye-ji) Do Young-seo (Joo Min-seo) |
Scroll the table sideways to view additional columns on mobile.
Plot Synopsis of Korean Drama The Affair Was Just the Beginning (2026) K-Drama Guide
The story follows Park Kyung-hee (Kim Hye-Soo), an influencer and CEO of an interior design company whose family image appears flawless on social media. She is married to Lim Jae-hong (Kim Ji-hoon), who lives in the shadow of his wife’s success. In an effort to grow her business, Park Kyung-hee approaches her neighbour, dermatologist Ahn Soo-jung (Cho Yeo-jeong), hoping Soo-jung’s connections might bring in investors. Ahn Soo-jung, for her part, is in the middle of a bitter divorce from her ex-husband, Joo Bo-sung (Kim Jae-chul), with a custody battle over their child under way.
After hearing rumours that her husband is having an affair with the actress Ryu Ji-su, Park Kyung-hee follows Lim Jae-hong and is met with a far greater shock than she had anticipated: her husband is dragging a body through an empty building. Lim Jae-hong’s explanation is even more alarming still: the body is thought to be connected to an incident involving their daughter, Lim Ye-ji. To protect their family and their reputation, the couple decides to bury the body in their own garden only to receive an anonymous message that very same night claiming that someone has recorded everything they did.
The drama’s multi-perspective structure is evident from the earliest episodes. Episode one is told entirely from Park Kyung-hee’s point of view. Episode two then replays a number of scenes from the first episode, this time from Ahn Soo-jung’s perspective and it is here that the show’s central trick becomes apparent: scenes that once seemed entirely ordinary, such as a shared dinner, turn out to conceal a hidden layer once viewed from another character’s POV. Small details, such as a dropped glass and a cut to the finger that had seemed insignificant, turn out to originate from an entirely different incident than the audience had assumed in the previous episode including a discreet flirtation from Ahn Soo-jung that leads to a touch beneath the table during that very first dinner.
Moving into episode three, the point of view shifts to the two teenage daughters of the neighbouring families, Lim Ye-ji and Joo Min-seo. Episode four returns its focus to Park Kyung-hee and Lim Jae-hong as they confront the consequences of the incident involving their daughter, while the thread of blackmail begins to unravel: the blackmailer demands roughly £280,000 (approximately 500 million Korean won, at an estimated exchange rate) to delete the recording that threatens to destroy both families’ reputations.
Read Also: Keadilan Sosial Pangan Indonesia: Saat Kekayaan Ikan Laut Tak Sampai ke Semua Meja Makan
The two most recent episodes shift the tension towards the hunt for the blackmailer. Park Kyung-hee meets a prospective investor to raise additional funds, while Lim Jae-hong scrambles to gather the necessary cash after the ransom demand escalates. The ransom drop goes ahead and it is at this point that a GPS tracker, secretly planted earlier by Park Kyung-hee on another party’s belongings, finally pays off, leading them to the blackmailer’s identity: a figure already familiar to the main characters. The twist deepens further when it emerges that the recording used for blackmail did not, in fact, come from Ahn Soo-jung as previously suspected, but from someone in her orbit and its contents turn out to concern an affair, not the buried body that both families had spent the entire series dreading being exposed.
The biggest shock of episodes five and six are comes via flashback: the scheming lawyer Joo Bo-sung is shown taking the phone from the hand of the private investigator believed to be dead, in an attempt to erase evidence of his own wrongdoing only for the supposedly lifeless figure to suddenly rise and attack him. A blow from a bottle to the head follows, leaving an open question: was that strike enough to kill him for a second time? The final two episodes (ep 7 and 8) are scheduled to bring the mystery to a close.
Read Also: Review dan Spesifikasi OPPO Find X9 Ultra Kamera Hasselblad Luar Biasa
MEZZALA Analysis: Why Does the Rashomon Effect Formula Suit in Mystery Thriller Film?
This layered narrative approach is more than a mere artistic flourish. By withholding information from the audience until precisely the right moment — through the repetition of scenes from differing points of view — the screenplay for The Affair Was Just the Beginning forces viewers to continually reassess who is genuinely at fault, who has simply been caught up by circumstance, and who is quietly orchestrating events from behind the scenes. The drama’s greatest strength lies in the natural chemistry between its cast, including the two young actresses Jeon Si-hyun and Do Young-seo, whose performances are widely praised for rounding out the story. Visually, the drama is bright and beautifully shot, yet this only heightens the unease created by the intrigue lurking beneath the surface — all captured through tight framing and sharp lighting.
Based on the six episodes broadcast so far, The Affair Was Just the Beginning appears to lean towards a modified Rashomon pattern, rather than the classic Kurosawa model. The distinction matters: in the classic Rashomon, as in the original 1950 film, the audience is deliberately left without any certainty as to who is telling the truth right up to the very end. This drama, by contrast, uses its shifting points of view to progressively expose hidden details a dropped glass, a cut finger, a misattributed recording before ultimately steering towards a clearer set of objective truths, in a pattern more akin to The Last Duel or Gone Girl.
What makes this drama particularly compelling from a production standpoint is the decision to place two charismatic actresses, Kim Hye-Soo and Cho Yeo-jeong, on equal footing at the centre of the story rather than positioning one as the lead and the other as merely supporting. A family drama built around betrayal and mystery is hardly a novel premise in Korean television, but pairing it with a Rashomon structure that consistently preserves the internal timeline across each version, while crafting memory distortions that remain believable, is a considerably more demanding feat of screenwriting than a single, straightforward point of view. A full assessment of the eight-episode structure will only be possible once the final two episodes have aired.
Read Also: Hubungan Kesehatan Usus dengan Kesehatan Kulit Wajah dan Rambut
Kim Hye-Soo Profile A 56 Year-Old Korean Actress Looks Like She’s Barely 30s
Kim Hye-Soo was born in Busan on 5 September 1970 (aged 56), and studied at Dongguk University and the Graduate School of Sungkyunkwan University. Over the course of her career she won Best Actress at the 52nd Baeksang Arts Awards (2016) for her role in Signal, followed by the Baeksang Icon Award in 2019. Other notable titles on her résumé include Tazza: The High Rollers, The Thieves, Coin Locker Girl, Hyena, Juvenile Justice, and Under the Queen’s Umbrella.
The Affair Was Just The Beginning Where to Watch?
Where can I watch The Affair Was Just the Beginning?
The drama airs on Coupang Play for audiences in Korea, and is also available on VIU and Viki across most international territories, including Indonesia. Click the link to watch the Korean drama The Affair Was Just The Beginning (2026).
How many episodes are there in total, and when does it conclude?
Eight episodes in total, released in pairs each Friday since 31 July 2026.
Is this drama a purely classic Kurosawa-style Rashomon Effect?
Not necessarily. Across the six episodes broadcast so far, the drama leans closer to a modified Rashomon approach using shifting points of view to gradually reveal the truth, rather than leaving the mystery permanently unresolved.
Read Also: The Story of Asiyah, Wife of Pharaoh and Adoptive Mother of Prophet Moses in MEZZALA’s Cahaya Islam section.
Sources: Wikipedia — The Affair Was Just the Beginning, Dramabeans — Drama Hangout, MyDramaList.
This article was produced and already published on mezzala.id with recent research findings (Wikipedia, Dramabeans, MyDramaList, Asianwiki, VIU, Viki)
