Which Mousetrap Character Are You?

Learn More About Mousetrap

Mousetrap, known during production under the working title The Rat, is a South Korean thriller that Netflix has positioned as one of its biggest Korean drama releases of August 2026. The ten-episode series is based on the webtoon Field Mouse (Deuljwee) by the artist Ludovico, a hit Kakao webcomic that ran from 2017 to 2020 and built a devoted following around its unsettling premise: an old Korean folktale claims that if a rat eats a person's discarded fingernail clippings, it can transform into that person and steal their entire life.

The series follows Je Mun-jae (played by Ryu Jun-yeol), a reclusive novelist who writes under a pen name and has barely left his apartment in years, largely due to social anxiety. His carefully controlled routine collapses the moment his phone's fingerprint scanner stops recognizing him. One by one, every piece of proof that he is who he says he is slips away, his accounts, his passwords, even the friend who used to help him manage the outside world vanishes without a trace. Mun-jae eventually learns that a mysterious figure known only as "the Rat" has assumed his identity, his money, and his name, leaving him to somehow prove he is the real Mun-jae in a world that no longer recognizes him.

Desperate and with nowhere else to turn, Mun-jae seeks out No-ja (Sul Kyung-gu), a calm, calculating loan shark who also runs a private investigation agency on the side. No-ja has spent three years hunting for Mun-jae ever since he borrowed money and disappeared, so when Mun-jae resurfaces asking for help tracking down the Rat, No-ja sees an opportunity to finally collect what he's owed. Their uneasy alliance forms the emotional spine of the series, two men who don't trust each other, bound together by a debt and a mystery neither can solve alone.

Rounding out the central trio is detective Sun-yong (Lee Kyoo-hyung), who has been chasing the Rat through official channels for far longer than anyone realizes. As the investigation deepens, Mun-jae starts seeing his own doppelganger walking the streets, and the show leans into the unsettling question of whether these sightings are the product of exhaustion and paranoia or something more literally impossible, a visual manifestation of just how thoroughly his identity has been hijacked.

Mousetrap comes from director Kim Hong-sun, whose credits include the acclaimed Dear Hongrang and Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area, giving the production a pedigree in stylish, high-tension genre storytelling. Screenwriter Lee Jae-gon, known for the workplace thriller TEN, adapts Ludovico's source material with an emphasis on psychological unraveling as much as plot mechanics, the horror here isn't just that someone stole Mun-jae's identity, but the deeper dread of realizing how replaceable a modern identity actually is once the digital scaffolding of passwords, fingerprints, and bank logins gets pulled away.

Filming took place across 2025, and Netflix unveiled the first teaser and poster in late July 2026 ahead of the confirmed August 28 global premiere. Early trailers lean hard into psychological horror-thriller territory, trading some of the source webtoon's pulpier crime-thriller beats for a slower, more paranoid tone. With a tight ten-episode order and a starry pairing of Ryu Jun-yeol and Sul Kyung-gu, two of Korean cinema's most respected leading men working together for the first time, Mousetrap has quickly become one of the most anticipated K-drama releases of the back half of 2026.

If you're a fan of high-concept Korean thrillers that blur the line between crime procedural and psychological horror, Mousetrap is shaping up to be essential late-summer viewing, and this quiz is a fun way to figure out which corner of its identity-theft nightmare you'd fall into first.