Go Hyun-jung in Queen Mantis: If She Isn’t a Killer, How Is This Performance Possible?

Go Hyun-jung’s acting is insane. No—it’s insanely insane!

(Official poster of Queen Mantis — Go Hyun-jung and Jang Dong-yoon face off)

The fact that director Byun Young-joo and Go Hyun-jung came together for a thriller was already enough to pull me in. (One day I hope I’ll get to write just about Byun Young-joo.) Go first imprinted on me as Mishil in The Great Queen Seondeok, and that shock was so overwhelming that I didn’t even need to seek her out afterward—she just kept showing up in the works I happened to watch. Her performance doesn’t force plausibility; it makes you slip into thinking, this might be real. In Queen Mantis, that ability completely explodes.

(Go Hyun-jung as Jung I-shin, imprisoned for the brutal murders of five abusive men in Queen Mantis)

The first encounter with her son after twenty-three years instantly shifted the air. There was no warmth in that reunion. Cha Soo-yeol’s voice was cold with suppressed rage, while Jung I-shin froze for a moment—then changed. She slipped between the face of a psychopath savoring murder and the face of a mother seeing her son again after decades.

(Mother and son forced into a chilling alliance to hunt the copycat killer)

“The smell of blood? I like it. That’s the smell you made when you were born.”

That single line froze the screen. This wasn’t just a thriller—it felt like peeking into an actual crime scene.

(Jung I-shin (Go Hyun-jung) revisits the copycat crime scene with a childlike smile, 

while Cha Soo-yeol (Jang Dong-yoon) watches with a look of sheer disgust)

Later, when she walked through the crime scene humming to herself, it was just as unnerving. Her expression flickered as if reliving past murders—sometimes twisting into the innocent grin of a child, which made it even more chilling. She never handed over clues directly, only dropped ambiguous words. Watching her, I felt the same suffocating frustration as Cha Soo-yeol—desperate to catch onto something, anything.

Go’s detail is what makes all this terrifying. The trembling of her hands while controlling her breath, the slight shift of her look—it all lands with terrifying precision. No tricks are needed. It no longer felt like a drama. It felt like reality cracking open.

And that’s exactly where the contrast shows. Jang Dong-yoon has grown, but when he’s up against Go Hyun-jung, his emotional lines blur. That laugh-cry scene? It felt overblown, more like stage acting than television. And honestly, I felt the gaps with other actors too. In scenes without Go, most of them seem fairly natural—but the moment she steps in, the difference becomes impossible to ignore. To me, much of the dialogue in the key scenes is stiff, almost literary, which would be tough for any actor. Still, the one carrying the drama on her shoulders is Go, and Go alone.

I’ve even watched her vlog—the rare glimpse into her private life that went viral in Korea. Yet when I see her as Jung I-shin, none of that off-screen image surfaces. The way her intonation, emphasis, and the tiniest gestures flip the emotion—it erases everything else. As a viewer, I just couldn’t reconcile this Jung I-shin with the person I saw in that vlog. Fan or critic, you can’t help but admit she’s on another level.

(The investigation team that joins Go Hyun-jung and Jang Dong-yoon in the dark chase of Queen Mantis)

And then there’s the what-if: Park Chan-wook originally offered Lady Vengeance to Go before it went to Lee Young-ae. Watching her now, I can’t help but think the Geum-ja he first imagined looked something like this.

This isn’t just acting.

If Go Hyun-jung isn’t a real killer, how can she possibly make it look—and feel—this real?

That’s just how it felt to me—as if I was watching something too real for television.

For those moments, she is the Mantis.

Want to watch it yourself?

- Watch on Netflix