In Mask Girl, Kim Mo-mi, a regular girl who is insecure about her looks, becomes a masked personality on the internet, which leads to her life getting disrupted. The series is now streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Kim Mo-mi always wanted to be a celebrity, but her dream could never come true because of her looks. People around her, including her mother, always made her feel like she is unattractive. Eventually, Mo-mi ends up getting an office job and living an ordinary life.
However, she does not give up on her dreams entirely. At night, she dons a mask and becomes an internet personality known as Mask Girl. She live streams her performances for her fans and gets paid.
Soon after, Mo-mi catches her married boss, whom she likes, sleeping with a colleague. That night, she gets drunk and takes off her clothes while performing for her fans. Due to this, her account gets suspended. She also spreads rumors about her boss, and he is forced to quit his job.
She then gets a mail from an anonymous sender who knows that she is Mask Girl. She then starts chatting with one of her fan accounts called Once Upon A Prince. What she does not know is that the sender of the mail as well as the user known as Once Upon A Prince is one of her colleagues, Oh-nam Ju.
Oh-nam Ju is a man who, like Mo-mi, is ridiculed for his looks. He now tries to keep his head down and be invisible to everyone. Oh-nam Ju figures out that Kim Mo-mi is Mask Girl and falls in love with her.
When Mo-mi goes out with one of her fans, Handsome Monk, Oh-nam Ju finds out that the man is going to take advantage of her and tries to warn her. Handsome Monk pretends to be a nice man and takes Mo-mi to a hotel, where he forces himself on her.
Mo-mi tries to push him away, and Handsome Monk gets a head injury. Mo-mi sees Oh-nam Ju’s messages and comes to know that Once Upon A Prince is his account. She calls him to the hotel and tells him what happened. Oh-nam Ju decides to take care of the body for her and sends Mo-mi home.
It turns out that Handsome Monk is not dead, but as soon as Oh-nam Ju realizes that, he panics and stabs him repeatedly. Oh-nam Ju conceals the murder but comes to know that Mo-mi has quit her job and is moving away.
Oh-nam Ju goes to Mo-mi’s house and rapes her while she has her mask on but soon realizes that Mo-mi has gotten plastic surgery. Mo-mi takes advantage of his surprise and stabs him to death. She then dismembers his body, throws it away, and disappears.
This is where Oh-nam Ju’s mother, Kim Kyung-ja, enters the picture. Kim Kyung-ja likes to believe that her son is perfect, so even when the police find Handsome Monk’s dismembered body at Oh-nam Ju’s house, she refuses to believe that her son could have killed him.
The police believe that Oh-nam Ju ran away with Mo-mi, and Kyung-ja takes it upon herself to find her son; she even acquires new skills for that. When the police find Oh-nam Ju’s body, Kyung-ja decides to look for Mo-mi and get her revenge.
She manages to find Mo-mi and goes to extreme lengths to kidnap her. However, the girl she kidnaps turns out to be Chun-ae Kim, Mo-mi’s colleague and rival. Chun-ae tells Kyung-ja that she wants to help her find Mo-mi, who now has a different face and name, because Mo-mi stole the spotlight from her at work.
Kyung-ja decides to take her help, not knowing that Chun-ae is Mo-mi’s best friend. Chun-ae already knows about Mo-mi’s past and had cooked up the story of their rivalry to mislead Kyung-ja and protect Mo-mi.
As a child, Kim Chun-ae was a shy girl. The boy she liked took advantage of her, which led to her destroying his career. Chun-ae grew up and got plastic surgery. She met the boy again and started dating him.
She now works at a club, while her boyfriend, who is still a good-for-nothing, leeches off her hard-earned money. When one of Mask Girl’s fans finds Mo-mi and recognizes her and Chun-ae’s boyfriend starts abusing her, the two women decide to run away together.
Chun-ae’s boyfriend catches her leaving and beats her up. It is Mo-mi who comes to her defense, and the two women kill him. At the same time, Kyung-ja comes to know that Chun-ae lied to her and follows the two women out of the city when they go to throw Chun-ae’s boyfriend’s body in a river.
Mo-mi had just told Chun-ae that she is pregnant with Oh-nam Ju’s child, so when Kyung-ja points a gun at Mo-mi, Chun-ae claims that she is the real Mo-mi, which leads to Kyung-ja deciding to kill them both.
Chun-ae and Mo-mi try to snatch the gun from Kyung-ja, and in the struggle, Chun-ae gets shot. Before dying, Chun-ae saves Mo-mi by hitting Kyung-ja with a rock. A heartbroken Mo-mi puts Chun-ae’s boyfriend’s body in Kyung-ja’s car and pushes the car into the river with Kyung-ja inside.
In 2011, Mo-mi is caught by the police. She comes to be known as Mask Girl, a serial killer. She is then sentenced to life in prison. However, before that, she gives birth to her daughter, Kim Mi-mo, and leaves her with her estranged mother.
When people find out that Mi-mo is Mask Girl’s daughter, she is isolated at school. She starts getting into fights, and her grandmother has to move her to different schools. Mi-mo does not get any affection from her stern grandmother and grows up to be a loner.
In 2023, Mi-mo is transferred to yet another school and meets a girl named Ye-chun. When Mi-mo saves Ye-chun from getting bullied, Ye-chun tries to befriend Mi-mo. She is able to do that only after telling Mi-mo that her father often gets drunk and abuses her mother.
The two girls grow close and plan to run away from home together. Mi-mo confides in Ye-chun about her mother and tries to steal a woman’s laptop to get enough money to run away with Ye-chun. However, she gets caught and runs away on her own when her grandmother slaps her.
She then finds out that everyone at school knows her secret and that Ye-chun lied to her about her father abusing her mother. Ye-chun comes from a loving family and has been lying to Mi-mo all along.
Mi-mo’s grandmother looks for her everywhere, but to no avail. Mi-mo calls Ye-chun to meet her and beats her up for lying to her and revealing her secret to everyone at school. However, there is more to the story.
Mo-mi went to prison in 2012 and openly defied An Eun-suk, a prisoner everyone was scared of, as she had connections with influential people; she even had the warden in the palm of her hand.
Mo-mi was sent to solitary confinement several times, but she kept beating up a woman from An Eun-suk’s gang, who attacked her once, until An Eun-suk was forced to call a truce. After that, no one bothers Mo-mi in prison.
Years later, in 2023, she gets a letter from someone. The person sends her a newspaper article on Mask Girl’s daughter’s violence and writes to Mo-mi about how she will now know what it feels like to have a broken child.
Mo-mi gets worried about Mi-mo and tries to break out of prison but fails. She is then sent to solitary confinement and given a Bible by their overly religious warden. Mo-mi is kept there for over a month, and they only let her go when the warden sees that Mo-mi has now turned religious.
Mo-mi changes completely and even offers to donate a kidney to An Eun-suk’s sick daughter. At a training session, which involves prisoners meeting volunteers from outside, Mo-mi meets a woman, who tells her that she is Kyung-ja, Oh-man Ju’s mother.
It turns out that she did not die when Mo-mi pushed her car into the river. However, she did become a murder suspect, as Chun-ae’s boyfriend’s body was found in her car, so she decided to get plastic surgery and a new identity.
Kyung-ja soon found out that she cannot kill Mo-mi because Mo-mi has been caught by the police and sent to prison. However, she could not let go of her grudge against her. Whenever she saw Mo-mi’s daughter, she got reminded of her, so she decided to ruin Mi-mo’s life to get revenge on Mo-mi.
She opened a tteokbokki stall outside Mi-mo’s school when Mi-mo was very young and managed to win her trust. She was the one who kept telling everyone about Mi-mo’s mother being Mask Girl, which led to Mi-mo losing her friends, and taught Mi-mo to be violent.
Furthermore, it was not Ye-chun who betrayed Mi-mo and revealed her secret to everyone; it was Kyung-ja, who was seen smiling from a distance when Mi-mo beat Ye-chun up. As Kyung-ja is the only person Mi-mo trusts, Mi-mo goes to live with her after running away from home.
Kyung-ja now tells Mo-mi that she was the one who sent her that letter. She promises Mo-mi that she will make her feel the heartbreak of losing one’s child. Mo-mi panics and tries to stop her, but the prison guards hold her down as Kyung-ja smiles and walks away.
Mask Girl ending explained in detail:
Why does Mo-mi run away from the hospital?
Kyung-ja leaves after informing Mo-mi that she is going to kill Mi-mo. Mo-mi tells the prison guards about it, but no one believes her. She finally tells An Eun-suk, who promises to help her. She assures Mo-mi that her people outside are looking for Mi-mo.
Mo-mi even tries to warn her mother, who is already looking for Mi-mo, but even she does not listen to her. On the other hand, Kyung-ja gets Mi-mo to call her grandmother and tell her that she is safe in order to prevent her from filing a missing person report.
It turns out that An Eun-suk is not trying to help Mo-mi. An Eun-suk is lying to her to prevent her from changing her mind about donating her kidney to her daughter. It does not take Mo-mi long to realize what An Eun-suk is doing.
Since her old mother is the only one who is looking for her daughter, Mo-mi decides to run away to save her daughter. On the day she is supposed to donate her kidney, she is taken to the hospital.
There, Mo-mi manages to outsmart the guards who have accompanied her, steal a car, and run away, but not without getting injured in the process.
Does Mo-mi’s mother find Mi-mo?
Mo-mi’s mother remembers that Mi-mo used to talk about the lady who sold tteokbokki outside her school. The woman used to go to the same church as Mo-mi’s mother, so she manages to get her number and address.
At the same time, Ye-chun finds out that Mi-mo’s tteokbokki grandmother was the one who told everyone at school about Mi-mo’s mother. Ye-chun goes to Mi-mo’s grandmother’s house and tells her about the same. She also decides to accompany her to Kyung-ja’s house.
After escaping, Mo-mi calls her mother once again and finds out where Mi-mo has been taken. She also asks her mother to call the police and not go there alone. Mo-mi’s mother follows her advice and stops Ye-chun from going with her, but Ye-chun gets another taxi and follows her to Kyung-ja’s house.
Meanwhile, Kyung-ja ties Mi-mo up in her hidden basement and plans to record her death. As Mo-mi’s mother had called the police, the police come to Kyung-ja’s house but fail to find Mi-mo and leave. However, minutes later, Mo-mi’s mother arrives there.
While she tries to stop Kyung-ja, Ye-chun goes to the basement to rescue Mi-mo, who has been left there to suffocate. Kyung-ja stabs Mo-mi’s mother, who is ready to risk her life to protect her granddaughter, but Mo-mi comes there in time and saves her mother from Kyung-ja.
Does Kyung-ja kill Mi-mo?
Mo-mi leaves her mother with an unconscious Kyung-ja to rescue her daughter first. Kyung-ja regains consciousness and stabs Mo-mi’s mother once again. She then goes to the basement with a knife to kill Mo-mi and Mi-mo.
Mo-mi fights Kyung-ja and asks Mi-mo and Ye-chun to run away. The two girls make it out of the basement, only to find Mo-mi’s mother dying. In her final moments, Mo-mi’s mother apologizes to Mi-mo.
Soon after her mother dies, Mo-mi comes out of the basement after defeating Kyung-ja. The police then come to Kyung-ja’s house to arrest Mo-mi, who does not put up a fight. However, an injured Kyung-ja also comes out with her gun.
Kyung-ja ignores the police’s warnings and shoots at Mi-mo to make Mo-mi suffer the way she herself did when her son died. Mo-mi shields her daughter and takes the bullet for her. Mo-mi dies in Mi-mo’s arms, and Kyung-ja is killed by the police.
Sometime later, Mi-mo is seen going to school with Ye-chun, whose parents become Mi-mo’s temporary guardians. Mi-mo no longer hates other people. She also watches her mother’s childhood videos and cries for her.
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