The Price of Confession Recap Episodes 1 & 2: A murderer offers freedom, but at what cost?

Spoiler warning: This is a recap of the first and second episodes of The Price of Confession. If you haven’t seen these episodes yet, please head over to Netflix and do so, before reading the recap.

A schoolteacher named An Yun-su (Jeon Do-yeon), accused of murdering her husband, received an intriguing proposition from a confessed murderer called Mo-eun – she would confess to the husband’s murder, freeing Yun-su, if she agreed to a dark price. What? Exactly. It’s been a while since the basic thrust of a story caught my attention immediately. The logline was intriguing. Now, it becomes a matter of the series having to live up to it.

I usually recap one episode at a time, but the first episode was mostly a setup, background to Yun-su’s life with her husband and how the police and the prosecutor became convinced that she murdered her husband. It was not until the very end that we even got to meet Mo-eun, casually hanging out in a lovely home, the bodies of her victims, husband and wife dentists, still warm near her. The TV was on, showing Yun-su’s arrest. Mo-eun went to the couch to get a closer look at the news, the dead wife beside her, and took off her wig. I went to Kim Go-eun’s Wiki page mid-watch. There are actors who could command the screen with just their eyes. She is one of them, an immediate compelling presence that elevated what started as a mostly flat, here’s-what-happened episode. 

Oh, all right, here’s what happened. Yun-su and her husband Lee Ki-Dae, an artist, have been married for five years, with one daughter. Like many if not most married couples, their lives had slid into a routine of mild annoyances and unceasing responsibilities. On the one night that they decided to set aside to rekindle the flame of their romance, Yun-su arrived at Ki-Dae’s studio and found him dying from multiple stab wounds. 

The police found Yun-su’s behaviour following her husband’s death curious. She wore bright-coloured clothing. She smiled a lot. She mentioned that she watched CSI so she knew the family needed to be investigated first. She had started selling her husband’s things online; it was as though she was erasing him, as former policeman turned prosecutor Baek Dong-hun (Park Hae-soo) observed. 

Ki-Dae’s penchant for filming his wife, and Dong-hun’s decision to release at least some of the footage, helped turn public perception against Yun-su, so that even with thin evidence, she was convicted of her husband’s murder. As the show made clear that Yun-su was, indeed, innocent, the episode-long setup became the slow unravelling of a nightmare, of how quickly people and society judged her guilty, of a normal woman who not only lost her husband to a brutal crime, but her young daughter as well, and the rest of her life that could and should have been lived, with all its mundanity and occasional sparks of joy.

Enter Mo-eun. She was arrested by the cops from inside the house with her victims; she never bothered to deny what she did. Indeed, she readily cooperated with details of her crime. She claimed she worked as a dental assistant for the couple she killed. She killed them because they were not nice. She poisoned them and waited there as they died horrific deaths without calling for help. She later described their last moments in graphic detail to a police psychiatrist. She always spoke softly, calmly. Her lack of remorse led people to call her a witch.

Who Mo-eun was, was a mystery. She could not be fingerprinted because she has been peeling the skin off her fingers. She claimed the initial injury came from handling chemicals at the clinic where she worked. Yet removing her own fingerprints was an early mark that she was hiding her identity. There were marks on her arms and legs that appear to be self harm scars.

When she recognised Yun-su in prison, the very lady she was watching that fateful day when she committed the murders, she concocted a way for the two of them to be side by side at solitary so they could speak. There, she gave her proposal.

Mo-eun was true to her word. She requested a jury trial, and there told the judge that she was confessing to another crime. By the end of the second episode, the show has not yet revealed Mo-eun’s demand in exchange for her confession, but it was right there in the Netflix show synopsis if you’d like to see it.  

Is The Price of Confession worth a watch? Yes. The story is unique, and Kim Go-eun is magnetic in every frame. It did start a bit slow, but that deliberate pacing served a purpose. Once Mo-eun joined the story, the show became a must watch. 

Rating: B+

Strays

🔍A friend has been caring for Yun-su’s daughter, but with the stress of the trial, not for much longer. Yun-su had a compelling reason to get out of jail.

🔍Yun-su participating in a crime scene recreation was amongst the things that doomed her case. Perchance she agreed to that because of all that CSI she watched?

🔍Mo-eun was texting the couple’s son from the mother’s phone before the police arrived.

🔍Mo-eun admitted to carrying around the poison for the couple, but said the surgical scalpel she had was for protection. 

🔍There was something about that cat watch Mo-eun wore; it was important to her. 

Original Air Date: December 5, 2025