If you like crime dramas where an ordinary man loses his name and has to bargain with someone worse than the thief to get it back, Mousetrap is the 2026 Korean series built for that appetite. It is a single season of crime, drama and mystery about a reclusive writer whose identity is stolen, and the deal he strikes with a ruthless loan shark to claw it back from a man called "The Rat." The taste it serves is specific: slow-burn paranoia, an unequal alliance, and the queasy suspicion that the ally is the real danger.
What it is
Mousetrap, released in 2026 under the original title 들쥐, runs one season and is tagged Crime, Drama and Mystery. The premise is compact enough to state in a sentence and heavy enough to carry a full season: a writer who has withdrawn from the world wakes up to find his identity taken, and the only person positioned to help him is a loan shark. Ryu Jun-yeol plays Je Moon-jae, credited as "The Rat," and Sul Kyung-gu plays Noja, with Lee Kyoo-hyung as Sun-yong, Kim Seung-oh as Seung-gyu, Hyun Bong-sik as Myung-su and Moo Jin-sung as Son Su-hyun. The character list alone tells you the shape of the thing: a small cast of men circling one stolen life, none of them safe to trust.
Note the structural choice that matters most here. The one season count means this is not an open-ended franchise asking for years of your attention, and the mystery genre tag is not decorative when the central question is who the thief actually is. A reclusive protagonist also sets the emotional scale: this is a story about a man with almost no social proof of his own existence, which is exactly the man an identity theft plot can destroy fastest.
Who it is for
The reader who finishes Mousetrap is the one who enjoys crime fiction where the alliance is the plot. If you are drawn to stories where the protagonist has to keep working with a person he would rather escape, and where the loan shark's methods become a moral problem rather than a convenience, this is your kind of season. The one season commitment helps: it is a finite watch, not a habit.
The reader who gives up is the one who wants a case cracked cleanly per episode. A mystery driven by identity theft and a nickname for a villain runs on withheld information, and withheld information is frustrating if you want procedure and resolution on a weekly clock. There is a second honest warning. Mousetrap holds an 8.7 rating from 12 votes, and 12 votes is a very small sample. If you choose your viewing by consensus score, there is no consensus here yet, only an early and enthusiastic handful.
What it does well, and what will irritate you
The strongest thing in the data is the engine of the story. An identity thief who is known by a nickname rather than a name is a good antagonist for a mystery, because the audience is denied the one fact the genre usually hands over early. Pairing the victim with a loan shark rather than a detective is the other smart move: it removes the institutional safety net and replaces it with leverage, debt and threat. Casting the same actor credit across Je Moon-jae and "The Rat" quietly signals that the show intends to play with who is wearing whose life, and that is a promise a crime drama can build a whole season on.
