Nine Puzzles

About this title

Nine Puzzles is an 11-episode Disney+ Original mystery thriller directed by Yoon Jong-bin. Criminal profiler Yoon E-na, who has lost her memory of the night her uncle was killed, and detective Kim Han-saem, who has suspected her for 10 years, are drawn together again when a puzzle piece recalling the case from a decade earlier is delivered once more.

Disney+ released episodes 1–6 first on May 21, 2025, followed by episodes 7–9 on May 28 and episodes 10–11 on June 4. The Disney+ Korea page rates it 15+. The screenplay was written by Lee Eun-mi. The title credits of episode 1 list both Yoon Jong-bin and Kim Jung-ho as directors. The series was produced jointly by Kakao Entertainment and its label Moonlight Film, and Kakao Entertainment was involved from the script's planning and development stage. For the puzzle illustrations that appear throughout the series, the production team considered some 50 artists from Korea and abroad before working with Yeon Yeo-in, who had worked on a special poster for the HBO series The Sympathizer and on the animation for Red Velvet's "Cosmic" music video. The images were completed through several stages, including pointillist and line-drawn versions as well as color and black-and-white versions.

Yoon Jong-bin directed the films Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time, Kundo: Age of the Rampant and The Spy Gone North, as well as the Netflix series Narco-Saints (2022), and Nine Puzzles is the first project he has directed without writing the script himself. At the launch press conference, he said that the scripts he writes carry his stamp and inevitably feel similar, but that with this script he felt he could try something he had never done before; because his previous project had been a series, he had wanted to make a film this time, yet the script drew him in enough to set that idea aside. He also explained that he saw the story as sitting on the border between the real and the unreal, so he framed it as a comic-book-like world and set the tone to keep a distance from reality in areas such as production design and costumes. In an interview after the release, he said he had kept the overall structure the writer had laid out and that what he reworked were the details of the characters.

Kim Da-mi plays Yoon E-na, a criminal profiler with the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, and Son Suk-ku plays Kim Han-saem, a detective in Violent Crimes Team 2 at Hangang Police Station. Episode 1 opens on a rainy night 10 years earlier. High school student E-na was in the house where her uncle Yoon Dong-hoon, a former chief of Hangang Police Station, died, but she cannot remember anything after she walked in, and Han-saem, the team's rookie detective on his first case, names her as a suspect because she was the only person in the house at the time. E-na hands the police a puzzle piece she says she picked up in the living room that night. Ten years later, on the date of the case, a puzzle piece with a drawing on it arrives for E-na by courier. In episode 2, E-na finds someone dead in an apartment complex's underground parking garage that same night and reports it, and she insists that the drawings on both puzzle pieces were made by the same person and that serial killings have resumed after 10 years, but Han-saem suspects her once more. Kim Sung-kyun plays Yang Jung-ho, leader of Violent Crimes Team 2; Hyun Bong-sik plays Choi San, the team's youngest member; Jung Man-sik plays Tae Dong-su, head of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency's Metropolitan Investigation Unit; and Jang Gyeok-su plays Hyun Ho-geun, chief of Hangang Police Station. Lee Sung-min, Hwang Jung-min, Park Sung-woong and others also make special appearances.

Yoon said that after reading the script, he saw E-na as unfiltered, blunt and honest about her own feelings, and wondered which actor could play her without making her unlikable; he felt that Kim Da-mi would make her seem unusual but never unlikable. Kim said that because E-na lives with trauma, she wanted to portray her as a kind of child frozen in that period of her life. Son said he settled on a coat and a beanie for Han-saem, and that the director even looked up dress codes for detectives but found no restrictions, so they kept the look. Kim Sung-kyun, working with Yoon again 13 years after Nameless Gangster, said the shoot had been a deeply moving time, and Hyun Bong-sik said he had mostly played squad leaders in his detective roles, so he was surprised to be offered the part of the youngest. Disney+ said, based on its own data, that the series ranked second among the most-watched Korean titles on Disney+ by hours viewed in its first week, behind only Moving, and in the annual viewing records The Walt Disney Company released in December 2025, it was named the most-watched Disney+ international original in the Asia-Pacific region that year. In August of the same year, it won Best OTT Original at the Global OTT Awards of the International Streaming Festival.

See alsoNarco-Saints 2022Karma 2025D.P. 2021

Drama Lineup editors · Fact-checked against: Korean Wikipedia, sidae.com, osen.co.kr, wikitree.co.kr, mt.co.kr, fnnews.com, ajunews.com, sports.khan.co.kr, news.tf.co.kr, enews.imbc.com, kisf.kr, disneyplus.com · 2026-10-18