Queen Mantis episode 1 review — The return of a ritualistic killer, a son’s torment, and a pact with doubt

Queen Mantis slices open the story with a body staged in a way that cannot be mistaken. The victim’s tongue is forced into his own anus, the grotesque seal that made Jung I-sin a legend of fear more than two decades ago.

She’s caged, yet her crimes breathe again in the present, copied with unnerving precision. The result is a murder scene that feels like a manifesto, violence arranged like handwriting, promising that the past has claws sharp enough to pierce the present.

The pilot of Queen Mantis thrives on unease rather than comfort, feeding on dread and on the constant suspicion that every gesture carries more meaning than it shows. And at the center of this unease, the story binds together the most dangerous of ties: blood.

The grotesque mark of the Mantis

The copycat resurrects the language of horror that once defined a generation of crime reporting. Jung I-sin killed predators of women and children and turned their bodies into warnings. The tongue-in-anus ritual was her way of forcing silence back onto men who thrived on cruelty. Seeing that signature return destabilizes the very idea of closure. Were her killings ever truly sealed away, or did they simply wait for the next stage of her plan?

The series films these moments with a precision that makes the grotesque disturbingly intimate. In Queen Mantis, there’s no catharsis, only the reminder that horror, once planted, grows back like weeds through concrete.

A son trapped between duty and blood

Cha Su-yeol is both detective and victim, carrying scars the narrative wastes no time in revealing. His trauma is laid bare: the shadow of his mother’s crimes, the constant echo of inadequacy. Where I-sin acted with merciless certainty, Su-yeol embodies hesitation, and that hesitation bleeds into every decision.

When the investigation pushes him into her orbit, the air itself seems to harden. Even confined, I-sin exerts a control that belittles bars and walls. A tilt of her head, a silence longer than it should be, each detail is a reminder that she dictates the tempo. For Su-yeol, this feels less like an investigation than a trial of survival: can he outlast her gravity without being swallowed whole?

The psychology of control

Jung I-sin sets her condition with chilling simplicity: she’ll only cooperate if her son stands beside her. It’s an arrangement that turns the police into pawns and Su-yeol into her chosen stage partner. Every line she speaks is coated in ambiguity. Is she helping the law, mocking it, or tightening a noose we can’t yet see?

The tension in Queen Mantis lies in what she might be holding back. Watching her is like watching a mantis poised before the strike. You can sense the violence stored in her stillness, and you know that stillness is part of the trap.

Doubt as the central thread

Queen Mantis builds its terror out of uncertainty. Every clue feels rehearsed, as though the killer is less interested in hiding than in taunting. The detectives chase shadows, but we get to understand that the shadows may be puppets, their strings held by I-sin herself. By the time the credits roll, the crime feels less like a puzzle than a mirror, reflecting the question that haunts everyone: where does her influence end?

This refusal to provide answers is the premiere’s sharpest weapon. Curiosity burns hotter than fear, because doubt is the emotion no one escapes from.

Why the name Queen Mantis matters

The title Queen Mantis carries more than menace, it carries metaphor. In nature, the female mantis is infamous for devouring the male after mating, turning intimacy into annihilation.

Jung I-sin embodies that instinct, a predator cloaked in maternal form, her violence inseparable from her identity as both woman and mother. By placing “queen” before “mantis,” the series frames her not just as a killer but as a sovereign of dread, someone whose influence extends beyond her cage and into the very fabric of the investigation.

It also signals the show’s roots as an adaptation of the French series La Mante, retaining the insect’s image as a symbol of elegance and terror entwined. In this Korean reimagining, the name becomes a prophecy: to confront the Queen Mantis is to risk being consumed, body and psyche alike.

Queen Mantis sets the stage for unease

The opening hour of Queen Mantis is brutal and magnetic. It’s a psychological snare, where justice feels like an illusion and family becomes the most dangerous battlefield. By leaning into dread instead of resolution, the show makes a promise: nothing here is safe, not even blood.

Rating with a touch of flair: 5 out of 5 tongues silenced and twisted into a prophecy of fear.