Watched all ten episodes of Korea's 2021 Juvenile Justice, a legal drama featuring a female judge who takes on a series of crimes committed by minors. Seems to me that the springboard could have been the USA's Law & Order: SUV, the protagonist Shim Eun-seok a Korean Olivia Benson replete with a traumatic past and receiving flak not only from offenders but also from colleagues. Lee Jeong-eun plays the Presiding Judge Na Geun-hee in the second half of the series--I recognized her as the crazy landlady in the chilling drama Strangers from Hell a.k.a Hell Is Other People.  

The series gives us a look at how investigations of juvenile cases and trials are handled in South Korea. The stories presented were possibly based on actual cases (murder, domestic abuse, tensions and harmful dynamics in a girls' home, a high school group's involvement in exam leakage, bullying and an underage group figuring in a motor accident, and gang rape and underage pornography).

The performances by the adults are commendable, the roles of Shim Eun-seok (Kim Hye-soo) and associate judge Cha Tae-joo (Kim Mu-yeol) impressively underplayed. If the juvenile actors and actresses are the actual ages of the the roles they portray, however, they definitely outshine the adults in nuances, and they are one bunch of superb performers.

This was a nice change from all the Korean supernatural movies I've been watching. It was disturbing but not depressing. Most importantly, it was very insightful. Despite its subject matter, the movie's treatment was far from melodramatic (except, perhaps, for that mother-in-law scandal scene in Episode 9). I also kept thinking how sad it is that our very own DSWD is burdened with more cases than it can handle.

Much is always attributed to K-drama performers, writers, and directors. Of equal expertise and seldom mentioned, however, are their editors and their handling of transitions, flashbacks, superimpositions, and scene variations and interpolations--distinctively and consistently Korean, for I have never seen such editing in movies from other countries.

P.S. This is the second or third movie I've watched that somehow indicates that Koreans have a shoe fetish.