‘Copycat Killer’ Review: A Tight Crime Thriller Filled with Amazing Characters

We are back again with another crime thriller. There have been several of these in the past weeks, and you could think we would get tired of them, and you would be right. However, occasionally, there is the opportunity to watch one thriller that grabs you and doesn’t let you go. This is the case with Copycat Killer, a new crime thriller coming straight from Taiwan that will transform you into a detective as you try to piece together the clues in each new episode. This is undoubtedly one of the best crime thrillers of the year so far.

Copycat Killer is a Taiwanese Netflix production, arriving on the streaming service this weekend. The series is based on Miyuki Miyabe’s novel of the same name. Miyabe is one of Japan’s most prolific and successful fiction writers, and many of her works, like Copycat Killer, have found their way to film and TV adaptations. This already gives an edge to Copycat Killer over many other shows of the same kind. Here, we have a story that has been thought out by one of the best in the genre, and you can feel it as you watch it progress.

The series stars Kang Ren Wu, Tsung-Hua Tou, Chun Yao Yao, Cammy Chiang, Teng-Hung Hsia, Ruby Lin, and many more. The impressive cast of actors is there to fill the roles with what is certainly the strongest element of the show—the characters. Copycat Killer is filled with amazing characters that make the story progress in very interesting ways. As you watch the series progresses, you will learn more and more about each character, and this character development then reflects on the many decisions the characters have to make.

Character development is often confused with just letting the characters talk. In many Hollywood productions, the exciting action and the character development moments are done in separate stages. This has made the character development moments to be usually executed through conversations. However, in this story, characters and actions are very closely tied together, resulting in a series of revelations that occur as the characters act on a certain event. Letting your characters choose their fate is fantastic and improves the story.

We have often seen the case where writers think about cool plot moments to establish and execute, but then we see that the characters are treated only as chess pieces. When this happens, you can feel that the characters start making decisions they wouldn’t have made otherwise and that some logic jumps are done to put the characters in the places they should be for the cool plot moments to happen. This is a failed attempt at creating a story, and it never pays off in the way the writers think. Just ask Game of Thrones last season to see how that went.

In the show, each of the main characters is their own person. These characters are so well drawn that you will potentially start to predict what they will do in the future, and this creates a lot of tension. This is not to say that the characters become predictable, but that they start acting like real people when facing such a crazy obstacle as the one presented on the show. You can push the characters to places they never really imagined. It is very nice to see a show that respects its characters.

The atmosphere of the show is also quite an important element. Taiwan is presented as a place that lives both in the future and in the past. The city and the country itself are running a race against the entire world, and they want to get to first place. If they make it or not is not relevant, but what is relevant is that the country is trying to compete. There is a sense that all the modern things that once worked are not working anymore. There is a sense that the country needs a shakeup to start a new modernization process.

The show is set during the early 90s, a very important and shifting era for all of Asia. Most of the markets were rising and falling at extreme speeds, and societies were discovering themselves after the falls of several regimes. A state of false peace permeated the entire region, and this is an excellent setting for a serial killer to show the people that false peace is just as fragile as ever. You just need a little push, and everything could come crashing down.

Visually, the show also goes to very cool places. The color palette prefers to be as dark as possible. There is a certain David Fincher influence in how the colors cover the entire city and make it seem like a place where bad things are happening. This is great because this is precisely the type of visual that would enhance a story like this. Often, TV series don’t know how to use the visual medium to enhance the stories, and there is a disconnect between what the story is telling and what it shows.

If a single part of the show feels like it could belong to another place, it is the killer itself. Sometimes the series approaches our main antagonist in a way that feels very much like a cartoon. I don’t think this approach works as well as they thought. It makes the killer seem ridiculous instead of scary, and there might be a bit too much of Jigsaw’s influence on the killer that the show is presenting. Jigsaw is quite cool, but that is Jigsaw. It would have been awesome if the killer could have had their own unique personality.

In the end, Copycat Killer works amazingly well as a crime thriller. The acting and the characters are fabulous, and the story feels meaty and very well-structured. By the time the show ends, you will feel like you watched something that was worth watching. If this series is a success, I would love to keep seeing more Miyabe adaptations in the future. Her imagination really takes us to places worth exploring and characters worth knowing. This is one of the best international Netflix releases of the year.

SCORE: 9/10