Eighteen-year-old Yeongri has one dream: graduate from a top university and give her father — who has sacrificed everything for her — a comfortable retirement. On the day of her college entrance exam, a freight truck slams into the car her father is driving. Yeongri walks away with minor injuries. Her father falls into a coma. Then middle-aged Chairman Song, her father’s former employer, arrives with a proposition. For the sake of her teenage daughter Chorong, she has devised a proxy exam project — and she wants Yeongri as the stand-in. The offer: top medical care for her father, and 3 billion won upon success. Yeongri, a girl who has never so much as jaywalked, refuses without hesitation. Then the landlord calls about a rent increase. Then the hospital calls about an emergency. She says yes. Chairman Song’s demands go beyond a high score. She wants Yeongri to infiltrate “Sky” — an elite study group at Chorom’s prestigious school, made up of children from the most powerful families in the country — and forge the connections that open doors into high society. So begins the Copycat Project. As Yeongri moves deeper into the world of the privileged, she witnesses the rot beneath its polished surface. Caught between shifting values and the pressure of survival, she begins to pursue a plan of her own.

The Imitation Girl is a social thriller that cuts to the heart of one of Korea's most entrenched obsessions: academic credentialing. A girl who has never broken a rule in her life plunges into serious crime to protect her family — and in doing so, finds herself face to face with a study group where elite pedigree and class are hopelessly tangled together, and with a question she can no longer avoid: who is she studying for, and what for? More than a school drama or a thriller, The Imitation Girl lays bare the absurdity of a society that treats academic credentials as the only ladder worth climbing.