THE documentary Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror recounts the true events surrounding the existence of Nth Room. Nth Room was a South Korean sexual slavery group that existed on Telegram between 2018 and 2020.
A number of victims, including juveniles, were coerced into making and distributing explicit videos and photographs of themselvea by the administrators of these Telegram chatrooms, who then sold the pornographic content to thousands of users from all over the world, who paid them in cryptocurrency.
When the story became public on South Korean media in early 2020, it was a massive scandal.
The story of how the Nth Room Case came to light began with an anonymous email sent to a journalist. Kim Wan, a journalist for the South Korean daily The Hankyoreh, tells how the email led him to a Telegram user named “Baksa”, who was blackmailing his victims, whom he referred to as his slaves, into recording themselves performing sexual acts and sending them to him. These images and videos were then shared within the Telegram chatroom to be viewed by members.
Even after cyber detectives were summoned, the criminal mastermind remained audacious, even threatening to force one of the victims to throw herself off the roof of the newspaper’s building, or to set herself on fire, should any news be published about his crimes.
The perpetrator was eventually apprehended and identified as a young college student. It was also revealed that he had ended up exploiting around 103 individuals.
Cyber Hell is a heartbreaking story about violence against women and how technology enables horrible crime. When it comes to production quality, this might be one of Netflix’s finest documentaries. It employs a variety of tactics to convey information to the spectator, including reenactments, extensive use of visuals, and interviews with police, journalists, and others involved in the case.
This includes Team Flame, a code name for two female students who did a brave undercover investigation in 2019. They provided police and journalists with enough evidence to prosecute those behind Nth Room.
The combination of all of these components results in a documentary that is intriguing not just because of the story, but also because of the production values. Overall, the documentary was absolutely worth watching. However, after conducting some internet research on the case, I realised that the documentary did not go into great depth and kept the narrative light. It avoids public outrage and does not focus too much on its victims and their traumas.
This is definitely not the type of true crime documentary that audiences are accustomed to. It’s dark, harsh, and horrifying. The majority of it is spent with people recounting the torturous experiences inflicted upon a number of young girls by vicious males on Telegram. There are even recreations of victims being dragged into phishing scams, with messages appearing in real time.
However, Cyber Hell does leave an impact. The documentary investigates the remarkable power of secrecy in the era of social media, how it can protect some genuinely heinous activity, and how it leaves victims of digital abuse wondering how they can ever feel safe and secure.
Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror is now available on Netflix.
DIRECTOR: Jin-Seong Choi
E-VALUE: 8
ACTING: 9
PLOT: 9
