Revenant (2023) K Drama Episode 9

Episode 9 of Revenant picks up where we left off, with the evil spirit paying Hong-sae and Mun-chun a visit at the police station. As soon as Hong-sae opens the door, the evil spirit launches her attack on Mun-chun. Hong-sae is surprised as he can’t see the ghost and wonders what Mun-chun is doing. Before opening the window and jumping to his death, Mun-cun tells Hong-sae that Hae-sang was right. 

Unfortunately, Hae-sang and San-yeong fail to make it in time to save Mun-chun. They arrive just in time to see him land on the ground and die. For a moment, Hong-sae is in shock, but by the time he gets to the ground floor, Mun-chun is long gone. He spots San-yeong and confronts her, asking exactly what she is. At first, San-yeong cries, but the next second, she is possessed by the evil spirit, which mocks Hong-sae’s pain. 

Hae-sang pulls her aside, grabs her by the collar, and says it would have been better if she had killed him. San-yeong, still possessed by the evil spirit, looks him dead in the eyes and tells him it is not his time yet. She then walks away and goes to a party. San-yeong wakes up the following day in her mother’s bed with no recollection of what happened after leaving the police station. 

Gyeong-mun assumes that San-yeong and Se-mi partied to celebrate Se-mi passing her exams. San-yeong lies to her that she is right and heads to her room, where she finds photos of herself taken during the party. She has breakfast with he curious mom and abruptly leaves when the topic of selling her grandma’s house is brought up. Gyeong-mun is surprised by San-yeong actions but believes her daughter when she says she has a meeting with the real estate agent.

San-yeong is overwhelmed with guilty that the evil spirit in her went to a party when Mun-chun had just died. However, the spirit reminds her that she needs her.

Back at the police station, other police officers look into what happened to Mun-chun. Some blame Hong-sae for not stopping him from jumping. None of them believe Hong-sae when he mentions that a woman stopped by. They checked the CCTV footage, and no woman was spotted. Nonetheless, Hong-sae takes their condemnation all in his stride and offers to be the chief mourner at Mun-chun’s funeral. It turns out Mun-chun had no family. The police suspect he killed himself because he was getting close to retiring and felt lonely.

On his way home, San-yeong stops Hong-sae and volunteers to turn herself in out of guilty. However, Hong-sae points out that there is no physical evidence and even with her testament, no one would believe them. He asks her to stay out of his sight for the time being. Hong-sae says he feels so angry he might kill her. 

The funeral goes well, and his friends give Mun-chun a befitting send-off. Hong-sae confides in Hae-sang that he feels guilty for not saving Mun-chun. He asks Hae-sang to apologize to Mun-chun’s ghost on his behalf. Hae-sang is also going through heavy grief though. Mun-chun was the only adult who actually listened and comforted him after his mom’s death. We finally learn why Mun-chun gave Hae-sang socks for all his birthdays and how they got close. 

After the funeral, Hae-sang moves into Mun-chun’s house. I think he can’t bear to return to his place since Woo-bin’s ghost is no longer there. Hae-sang is mourning two of his friends who left suddenly.  Hong-sae stops by, and they talk about Mun-chun’s last moments. After witnessing  Mun-chun’s death, Hong-sae is inclined to believe in the existence of ghosts.  He is now intent on catching the ghost at whatever cost. Hae-sang explains to him what he has been able to find out about the ghost. They agree that the reason Mun-chun was killed was probably because he found out something in the restored documents of Mokdan’s case. Hong-sae decides to look into it since Mun-chun destroyed the original files before he died. 

In the meantime, Hae-sang tries to reach San-yeong to no avail. He hopes she will tell him what she saw during Mun-chun’s death. He opts to pay her a visit at her grandmother’s place. He finds her sitting on the floor and the furniture around her turned upside down. He sees that the furniture has similar drawings, and San-yeong tells him it is the evil spirit doing. San-yeong is concerned that she has been losing her grasp of time since they found the rubber band. She thinks the evil spirit is using them to free herself from Gang-mo’s failed exorcism.

Hae-sang asks her about her memories from the night Mun-chun died, but she refuses to tell him. The evil spirit warned her not to say anything unless she wants Hae-sang to die. Hae-sang assumes San-yeong is hiding something from him because she wants to keep the ghost. He warns her that he will get rid of the evil spirit in her at whatever cost. He asks her to contact him if she remembers anything.

After Hae-sang leaves, San-yeong starts looking for the village elder’s belongings in the house. She remembers what documents she saw Mun-chun holding during one of her visions. Her investigation leads her to find an old ledger written in 1958 when Lee Mokdan was sacrificed. She wonders why her dad had the ledger and starts going through it, hoping to find the evil spirit’s weakness. She finds a copy of the cheque Choi Manwol got from Junghyeon Capital for her shaman services. 

She also notes there is a link to June 7th, the day Mokdan was kidnapped. There is also the day Mokdan’s body was recovered – June 24th. She finds a list of what the villagers received after Mokdan was killed. She decides to find someone who can tell her more about the kind of person her dad was. 

Elsewhere, Hae-sang tries to find the motive for everyone the ghost killed when she possessed Gang-mo. His investigation leads him to one of the victims, Chae Seo-rin. He meets with Seo-rin’s colleague, and she tells him about the last days leading to Seo-rin’s suicide. Seo-rin used to work at the library and was tasked with preserving old materials. 

Before her death, she destroyed a book and her colleague thinks it’s related to the ghost Hae-sang is after. Unfortunately, there is no other copy of the book at the library, and Hae-sang will have to get creative to find it since not many copies were published. Hae-sang finds it suspicious that the writer of the book committed suicide. He recruits the help of one of his old friends to try and get the book from the son of the writer. The son tells the old man that the book was actually a 1959 graduation yearbook from Jangjin Middle School.

Back to Hong-sae, he is unable to recover the restored files in Mok-dan’s case. However, he can get his hands on the second document Mun-chun was looking into. These documents involve Gang-mo being the guardian of the late Jangjin-ri village elder. Gang-mo picks up all the old man’s belongings. He visits Gyeong-mun and asks if she has heard of the village elder. Gyeong-mun tells him that she has heard of Jangjin-ri, but doesn’t know much about the old village elder or anything else.

Hong-sae also asks if San-yeong has been acting differently, and this scares Gyeong-mun, who tries to call San-yeong but fails to reach her.

After he meets with Gyeong-mun, Hong-sae follows San-yeong and wonders why she is visiting a hotel. He is even more suspicious, given that this hotel is located at the same place Hae-sang’s mom committed suicide. It turns out that after the suicide and fire incident, a new owner bought the land and renovated the hotel. Gang-mo was among their first visitors, and he occasionally continued to visit. 

He suddenly showed up on the night of his death and started digging around the tree he donated to the hotel. As San-yeong suspected, her dad had buried one of the items under the tree he donated to the hotel. He had buried the red hairpin, and came back that night because he realized his exorcism plan had failed and was looking for answers as to why.

Hong-sae follows San-yeong until she parks her car in the middle of the road, and he checks up on her. This is when he meets the evil spirit again and sees how different she is from San-yeong. The evil spirit asks him to drive her to an amusement park. Hong-sae stays back, watching and trying to get a read on her. He later tells Hae-sang that the ghost seemed to hate kids and didn’t consider herself as one.

Hong-sae stays with San-yeong until she returns to her senses. She is shocked to find herself in the amusement park and hails a cab back home. At home, she puts up a line of probation and locks herself in her late father’s study. She is wary that she keeps losing consciousness every night when it is either cloudy or raining. She is hoping to survive this night without any further incidents. 

As she sits waiting for morning, she gets an epiphany about the drawings and realises they are drawing a moon. She starts researching the moon phase on June 7th and 24th 1958. She learns that on June 7th, the moon was a waning gibbous, while on June 24th, the moon was a waxing gibbous. She also notes that there was no full moon between those dates either.

She starts to remember that in her vision, she saw a full moon, and if the ghost is Mokdan, then it is impossible that she saw that. She starts to question if the evil spirit is not Mokdan, then who is she? As she ponders this question, we see the ghost’s shadow standing outside her door.

Meanwhile, Hong-sae and Hae-sang go through the graduation yearbook from 1959 and make a discovery. Hae-sang fears that Gang-mo failed because the ghost’s name was not Mokdan. This aligns with what Hong-sae felt after observing the evil spirit at the amusement park. He felt like she displayed the emotional range of a teenager, and Mokdan was not a teen at the time of her death.