The king is reportedly sick and hasn’t been seen in public for so long that people suspect he’s dead, and if he is, the crown prince becomes the new ruler. Which is a problem for the prince’s new stepmother, the king’s new, young wife from a formerly rival clan. She’s extremely pregnant and if the king is alive—or dies after she gives birth—then her child becomes the rightful heir to the throne. Her father is one of the most powerful political figures in the country, and he’ll stop at nothing to secure a dynasty for his family, even if it means dispatching guards to track down and execute the crown prince.
This is the excellent misdirection of Netflix’s Kingdom. If you only have half the story, it’s a compelling, gloriously-costumed Korean medieval drama, full of palace intrigue, backstabbing, and scheming. It’s the kind of thing that, as a movie, would be prime Best Foreign Picture Oscar bait. What makes it stand out is the fact that it’s also... crawling with zombies.
To Kingdom’s immense credit, it’s not just The Walking Dead with a prettier backdrop. For one thing, it has an extra wrinkle that gives the plot room to develop: in this world, zombies don’t move during the day. For all intents and purposes, they’re just regular corpses when the sun is out, though inexplicably clutching one another, and this makes it nearly impossible for survivors to convince people about the pending horror. This gives the gory violence some punctuation. Rather than the world descending into apocalyptic chaos or grim survivalism immediately, all the political drama just keeps unfolding.
The king technically is dead, you see, the victim of some arcane medical treatment that, rather than curing his lingering illness, turned him into a rabid, pulse-less cannibal. He’s chained up in his quarters and fed an occasional servant to keep him satisfied. The queen’s goal is to keep his sort-of death secret until her child is born. The crown prince Yi Chang, fully out of the loop, just wants to know what the hell’s going on, and his investigation leads him to another fresh zombie outbreak in a poor, rural hospital run by the physician who tended to the king. The queen's father would rather have the prince dead than know the truth.
Of course, great zombie stories are rarely about zombies themselves. They're a stand in for any number of social anxieties: nuclear war, consumerism, natural disaster. In this case, writer Kim Eun–hee and director Kim Seong–hun have breathed new life into the zombie trope by fusing it not only with period drama but also with brutal social oppression. It's poverty and starvation that drives the outbreak, and the power-hungry royals and their sycophants are responsible at pretty much every step for exacerbating the crisis. They can't imagine fighting the zombies without also trying to shore up their own status and prestige at the same time, leaving peasants and farmers to have their throats gnawed out. Unfortunately for the bureaucrats and officials though, zombies don't see class.