# Heartless City (2013)

> A undercover-style noir thriller in which a woman takes up her murdered best friend's dangerous mission and falls for the prime suspect.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/48642

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 20
- Episode runtime: 60 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: crime, thriller, romance
- Network: JTBC
- Cast: Jung Kyung-ho, Nam Gyu-ri, Lee Jae-yoon, Kim Yu-mi, Son Chang-min, Yoon Hyun-min, Choi Mu-sung, Kim Min-sang
- TMDB rating: 7.8/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089614/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: brisk
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: accessible
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: seductive, tense, brooding, noir, mysterious

## Synopsis

Cruel City (2013) is a South Korean noir thriller series created for JTBC, a single-season run of twenty one-hour episodes. Nam Gyu-ri plays Yoon Soo-min, a woman who, after her best friend suffers a brutal fate while working undercover in the crime underworld, is driven to pick up where her friend left off. Her emotional pull leads her toward Jung Shi-hyun, played by Jung Kyung-ho, the organization's king pin, who is also the prime suspect in the killing. Lee Jae-yoon and Kim Yu-mi round out the principal cast as figures tangled in the criminal web. The engine of the show is a dangerous infiltration in which every alliance can turn into a betrayal, and each episode tightens the trap around Soo-min as she tries to decide whom she can trust. Set in a contemporary Seoul underworld of gangs and shadowy organizations, the series moves in a serialized, continuing arc rather than case-of-the-week episodes. Its tone is seductive and tense, with a brooding atmosphere, femme fatale energy and a mystery running beneath the romance. Fans of Infernal Affairs, Vagabond and Narcos will find resonance in its moral ambiguity and criminal glamour.

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