Nine Puzzles
Directed by Yoon Jong-bin (Moonlight Film, 2025)
Detective stories can be cliché. Often the humanity of the characters gets lost in the grisly details of the crimes and the whodunit plotlines. The South Korean drama Nine Puzzles is different. It wears its cinematic and narrative influences proudly on its sleeve while creating something memorable: characters you care about whose motives are complicated yet make sense. All the characters, even the antagonists, are painfully human and relatable.
The story revolves around Seoul detective Kim Han-saem and profiler Yoon E-Na, who become an odd couple in partnering in an ongoing murder investigation where, of course, no one can be trusted—not even each other. Many years ago, Kim was the rookie detective investigating the murder of Yoon’s uncle. And Yoon (who was in high school at the time) remains the prime suspect in that cold case. A decade later, Yoon is a young and brilliant profiler and Kim a veteran detective. As murders occur that seem connected to her uncle’s, someone starts sending Profiler Yoon puzzle pieces. Whether or not she is the killer, Yoon is the common denominator in these cases.
Nine Puzzles is a show that is grisly and unsettling because that is how it can honestly tell this story. The puzzle hook could have been a mere gimmick, but the screenwriters and director have a lot more on their minds. This is a character-driven ensemble with an intricate plot that encourages the actors to imbue these characters with humor, pain, and empathy.
Being influenced by many crime and noir forebears—Seven, Silence of the Lambs, and The Dark Knight are three obvious influences—the show takes risks in the right places as it explores the intersections of sin and grace, revenge and redemption, memory and trauma, and the very possibility of justice in a sinful world.
Nine Puzzles is now available to stream on Hulu.
This article also appears in the December 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 12, page 38). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Nine Puzzles Hulu Cover
