A painter walks into a hotel to paint a woman who supposedly hasn’t left the building in more than 50 years – only to discover that the woman waiting for him looks nothing like the elderly subject he was expecting.
That is the creepy setup behind Portraits of Delusion, the upcoming Disney+ Korean period horror series formerly known simply as Delusion – and this isn’t some small, cheaply made vampire drama either, as the series reportedly carries a ₩45 billion production budget, brings together Start-Up stars Suzy and Kim Seon-ho, and is being directed by Han Jae-rim, the filmmaker behind The 8 Show and Emergency Declaration.
Disney+ currently has the series listed as coming soon, with a second-half 2026 release planned.
A Portrait That Shouldn’t Exist
Set in 1935 Gyeongseong, the series centres on struggling painter Yun I-ho, played by Kim Seon-ho, who accepts a commission to paint the mysterious Song Jeong-hwa, played by Bae Suzy – Jeong-hwa has apparently been confined to her hotel for more than half a century, which would be strange enough, but the real problem is that when I-ho finally meets her, she looks like a young woman rather than the elderly woman he was hired to paint, before she then asks him to paint what she would look like at 70.
There is also a rather nasty warning waiting for him among the belongings of the previous painter – don’t finish the portrait, and I-ho soon discovers that the artists sent to work for Jeong-hwa haven’t exactly had successful careers after taking the job – some disappeared, while others reportedly lost their minds, leaving him trapped inside the hotel until the painting is completed.
The setup is basically a gothic locked-room horror story with a painter stuck inside a hotel with someone who may have been young for considerably longer than any human being has the right to be.
From Naver Webtoon to a ₩45 Billion Production
Portraits of Delusion is adapted from Hongjacga’s Naver webtoon Delusion, which originally ran from 2019 to 2020 and was later released in English through WEBTOON, where the English edition has accumulated more than 10 million views and almost 295,000 subscribers, and the completed series runs for 60 episodes, but the production is also making some fairly substantial changes to the source material.
The original comic uses 1935 Gyeongseong and 19th-century Shanghai as major settings, while the television production has instead developed a fictional environment known as K’s City, reportedly combining European architectural influences with a humid, gothic atmosphere.
That makes sense for a production with a reported ₩45 billion budget, particularly when you’re trying to turn a webtoon built around elaborate locations and supernatural imagery into an eight-episode live-action series, and The Korean Film Council has described the project as a major gamble for Showbox and Magnum Nine, putting its budget at around ₩45 billion ($32.3 million at the exchange rate cited by the organisation).
That is a serious amount of money for a Korean streaming drama.
Han Jae-rim Is Going Somewhere Very Different
Han Jae-rim has spent much of his career jumping between genres – his filmography includes Rules of Dating, The Show Must Go On, The Face Reader, The King and Emergency Declaration, before he moved into streaming television with The 8 Show in 2024.
Emergency Declaration was selected for the 74th Cannes Film Festival, where it screened out of competition, while The 8 Show marked Han’s streaming-series directing and writing debut, and his The 8 Show was also another expensive webtoon adaptation – reportedly costing more than ₩24 billion – so he isn’t completely new to taking a Korean webcomic and turning it into a large-scale streaming production.
We also have Hong Kyung-pyo as the cinematographer.
If that name doesn’t immediately mean anything, his credits include Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Burning, as well as The Wailing, Mother, Snowpiercer, Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War and the recent Harbin – Hong won the Grand Prize for Film at the 61st Baeksang Arts Awards for Harbin in 2025, and Portraits of Delusion represents his move into television drama cinematography.
That is a pretty ridiculous visual pedigree for a vampire series.
Suzy and Kim Seon-ho Are Reuniting
There is obviously another reason the series already has plenty of attention – Suzy and Kim Seon-ho have worked together before – they previously appeared opposite each other in the 2020 Korean drama Start-Up, although Portraits of Delusion is about as far away from that show’s technology-startup setting as you could possibly get.
This time Suzy is playing a mysterious woman with an apparently impossible history, while Kim Seon-ho is playing the artist dragged into her world – the supporting cast includes Choi Hyun-wook, Huh Joon-ho, Lee Hak-joo and Shin Soo-hyun, and Kim Young-kwang.
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