The nine-episode Taiwanese show “The Resurrected” (Original title: “Hui hun ji,” TV Series 2025) takes a revenge saga and infuses it with supernatural underpinnings. Trauma and grief unite the two mothers at the centre, who turn their bereavement towards strength and assertion of resistance. The mothers embark to extract justice for their wronged daughters and uncover a massive vortex of crime and corruption in Southeast Asia. Stakes escalate as each woman realises the many lives embroiled in an unimaginably sprawling, seedy business. The stature of players involved sharpens the tension, the near-impossibility of justice. But both women desist from surrendering to resignation and refuse defeat by the herculean cruelty of systems.
Recuperating justice is a tall task when mired in and up against syndicates controlling and reigning over many. The two daughters are nothing but mere casualties that must bear the price of the syndicate for aberration. Yet, “The Resurrected” is plagued by extreme indecision. It’s tonally wavering and unable to streamline its script into a solid, compelling sense of direction. Instead, it is left scrambling into a mess of confounding decisions that neither illuminate nor expand on the women’s shared grief. The show is too muddled to deliver its emotional resonance, constantly wrong-footed by its own mistaken choices.
The Resurrected (Hui hun ji, TV Series 2025) Recap:
Two women, Chao Ching and Wang Hui-chun, request a shaman to help resurrect their daughters. But the process doesn’t pan out. Hui-chun’s daughter has been comatose for three years, while Ching’s is dead. The latter’s daughter doesn’t have a body. Chang Shih-kai, who oversees a phone scam, has been convicted of raping and murdering many women from Taiwan, China, and elsewhere. The daughters were his prey. Lawyer Huang I-Chen, along with the mothers, conducts the lawsuit against Shih-kai. The man does get executed. However, the mothers do think the man didn’t get punished much, and suspect his family’s involvement.
Ching is averse to letting Hsin-yi go abroad, though they are facing financial adversities. Jin Jin is away working abroad, while her mother assures her she’s doing fine. The show keeps cutting between the past and the present day. In the latter, Hui-chun discovers her husband is having an affair, while their daughter is in a coma. The husband doesn’t seem at all interested in Jin Jin’s well-being. But she insists he sign off his apartment in her name. The women bribe Officer Li, who hands over the dead body of Shih-kai. Initially, the goddess refuses to resurrect him. However, when Ching falsely claims it’s her husband, he’s resurrected.
What scam do the girls get caught in?
Hsin-yi and Jin Jin discover they’ve been manipulated into working as scammers. They don’t tell the truth to their mothers. In the compound, the girls are starved till they achieve the daily requirement. Hsin-yi realises, to her horror, there is no way to escape the compound. The other option is death. Jin Jin works as an influencer for the company.
In the present day, the mothers, overtaken with rage, kill Shih-kai again, after torturing him. While taking him to the hospital, he escapes. But they nab him soon. They demand he hand over forty million dollars. He has a week. His life hinges on this fulfilment. In 2019. Ching had been kept in custody for a day. In 2024, Hui-chun trails Mrs. Chung and discovers she has donated a million dollars to charity as penance for her son. She thinks there might be something fishy in this charity foundation, housing murky secrets and connections. Eason flirts with Christina and takes her to meet his grandmother at the same hospital where Jin Jin is. Shih-kai falls prey to the women’s bullying tactics and confesses he has funds saved in cryptocurrency.
How did Hsin-yi die?
The mothers insist that their lawyer apply maximum attention to the lawsuit. They can’t concern themselves with ghost-writing the horrific anecdotes of girls who’ve lived and been sexually assaulted in the complex. They tell Shih-Kai about his son with An-chi, whom he had sexually assaulted. I-Chen doesn’t buy it when the women tell a goddess has resurrected Shih-Kai. Christina entreats her mother to give her one million dollars, but the latter is reluctant. Pong did see the horrors the girls suffered in the compound and decided to help the mothers, while Eamon’s grandmother is comatose because of Kai.
Also Read: 15 Most Complicated Mother-Daughter Relationships in Movies
Motives are lurking behind every seeming generosity, a nefarious design beneath apparent kindness. It’s a wicked, skewed world that offers no reprieve for the honest and sincere. Pong did try to help Hsin-yi plot an escape from the compound, but it failed horribly. The incident got reported, and Hsin-yi got nabbed. Ultimately, she passed away in captivity. Kai is aware that his escape is possible only if he turns the mothers on one another. They must grow a mutual doubt and spite, which will weaken the quest for justice and ease Kai’s successful escape. Kai tells Ching it was Jin Jin who reported on her daughter’s attempted escape.
Does Kai’s divisive tactic work?
Ching is desirous of killing Jin Jin and bringing her back through resurrection so that the truth could emerge. But Hui-chin’s mother is resistant. Jin Jin would be alive for just a week. Distance grows between the mothers, and the distrust that Kai wanted takes root. The chasm would widen as had been incited. Eason plans to court Christina and get all her mother’s money. But his aim seems to be headed for disaster. Pong edges close to Ching, while Eason grows tender towards Hui-chin. Christina succeeds in extricating Kai from the situation.
Meanwhile, the mothers have resolved their disagreements. Kai is in the dark about this, bold and confident, he has set off deep frays between them, when it couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, the mothers have fooled him. Kai’s mother, Yueh-hsin, is the one who oversees the syndicate operations. She’s pulling the strings. There are revelations about Kai and his sister being adopted by Yueh-hsin, who used to physically abuse them. That spurs Kai’s entry into the criminal underworld, inflicting the same violence on others he had received. As long as he earned enough money, Yueh-hsin wouldn’t hurt him and his sister. Yueh-hsin has the crypto wallet with her, the key to all the accumulated funds.
Big endeavours are set up. The avenging mothers seek to burst into the charity event, a smokescreen for all the laundering Yueh-hsin is involved in and perpetuates. Kai’s rage gets the better of him, and he kills Yueh-hsin for all the torture she had subjected him and her sister to. Christina isn’t very pleased about her brother, too, because she has been badmouthed for being the sister of a publicly shamed criminal. She gets caught up in an accident, and Kai retains possession of the wallet.
The Resurrected (Hui hun ji, TV Series 2025) Ending Explained:
Does the syndicate fall apart?
Kai believes he has put up walls between the mothers. He gets one to shoot the other, but it’s more of a smokescreen. Exulting, he says how he plotted to divide them. He also reveals it was someone else who informed on Hsin-yi’s planned escape. Right then, Ching tells him, to his shock, it was all a performance, and they have the wallet in their possession. Kai is devastated, and immediately, the week-limited resurrection ends, and he splinters. However, Pong now comes out of the blue and asks the woman to hand over the wallet. All this while, he had his eyes on the money and wasn’t driven by some great missionary zeal for justice. The makers seem to be in a rush to churn out twists and shocks for the sake of it, which divert from the real thrust the narrative could have taken.
An-chi tells Ching Jin Jin had pushed the girls into the scam. But Jin Jin later transforms and tries to alert the bank. By the time the cops arrive, Hsin-yi, terribly assailed, dies. Jin Jin and An-chin get into a scuffle, the former slipping off a balcony and falling into a coma for years. The final episode reveals Jin Jin with more nefarious plans than she lets on. Jin Jin aims to remove Kai from his topmost position. Was she actually comatose or lying low until Kai and his mother lost power? The finale sets the stage for a second season, luring a glimpse into Jin Jin’s bigger ambition.
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