Hellbound * The Red Sleave * Alchemy of Souls * Itaewon Class * It’s Okay Not to Be Okay
Mix a sci-fi, a sageuk (historical drama), a fantasy and two contemporary romances with a thriller edge, and there’s something for everyone in this five-star package. Less a list and more a means of packaging up some short pieces of writing on some of the best recent K-dramas that are not to be missed.
Hellbound
Asked to name the outstanding flaw in 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, most people would probably end up agreeing with me: explanation. 2001 provokes us with massive questions about humanity and existence that are unanswerable by their very nature. Imagine how disappointing it is to be told, in a visually pedestrian sequel, ‘actually, the answer is God and a computer programming logic error’. If there’s one place where the maxim ‘don’t explain, don’t apologise’ is valid (© The British Royal Family), it’s surely big idea, epic sci-fi. Same problem with Ridley Scott’s prequels to Alien. No mate, don’t care where they came from. The gob-smacking brilliance of that idea is all in the moment-to-moment psycho-drama in the claustrophobic corridors of the Nostromo.
K-drama, on the whole, is much more at ease with the notion of given circumstances and this legacy may have helped Hellbound avoid the ‘explanation’ mistake. The extraordinary premise of Hellbound just descends on the world with no warning. Ferocious indestructible monsters appearing from thin air to execute named individuals at an appointed hour is a fait accompli whose dramatic purpose is to examine the human condition in excoriating detail through the responses of humans individually and collectively. Not knowing how or why is part of the point.
Hellbound barely qualifies as a K-drama, it’s more like a very long film cut into six parts. It is beautifully written (Yeon Sang-ho, Choi Gyu-seok), moving economically over a huge amount of narrative and thematic ground. From the savage narcissism of social media fuelled group think to the hollow fear powering spiritual dogma, Hellbound eviscerates human weakness with an astonishing clear eye, while simultaneously exalting the human capacity for courage, resilience and sacrifice. The performances are equally exceptional from Yoo Ah-in’s opportunistic quasi-prophet, to Won Jin-ah’s desperate new mother, and Kim Hyun-joo as the lawyer caught in the middle. The climatic imagery will burn in your retina for a very long time. Breathtaking.
The Red Sleave
An astonishing achievement that readily explains why we return repeatedly to historical drama to understand more about our essential experiences as humans. The Red Sleave retells a famous royal romance from the Eighteenth-Century Joseon court. In much the same way as the Taj Mahal memorialises love through a monument to grief, the love story of Seong Deok-im, later Royal Noble Consort Uibin Seong, and Yi San, Jeongjo 22nd monarch of the Joseon dynasty, is celebrated mainly because of Jeongjo’s long and deep grief at her premature death.
However, The Red Sleave is told from Seong Deok-im’s point of view with a visual palette of brilliant light and colour. It charts the hopes and dreams of a young resourceful girl who is obliged to negotiate her progress, growth as a woman, friendships and ultimately love and motherhood in the suffocating environment of a ferocious patriarchy and rigid court hierarchy. It’s a mark of the creativity driving this drama that when the production company were asked to make an additional episode in response to the great reception the drama enjoyed, the creative team flipped the tone completely replacing the sunshine of the main drama with a cold wintery light of grief and regret. The sombre last episode culminates in an overwhelming scene in which the aged King and the last surviving member of Deok-im’s gang of girlfriends, now elevated to Head Court Lady, have a terse exchange alone in a cavernous hall that’s full of unspoken bitter recrimination over the memory of their long dead loved one. Yet, this harsh and gripping coda reveals that a minor key of sadness was gently playing in the background all the way through.
From the charming instrumental soundtrack to the meticulous attention to detail, The Red Sleave seems to be channelling 2003’s landmark Dae Jang Geum (Jewel in the Palace) in crafting an intricate portrait of an opaque female culture that manages to find ways to thrive under heavy restrictions. The scene in the silk farm hut where Deok-im and her three friends are tasked with laying out the trays of mulberry leaves is one of many closely observed set pieces based around the daily routine of the court ladies as their lives are measured out in never changing protocols. Lee Se-young and Lee Jun-ho are magnificent as the regal lovers. Even in the scenes where their love seems most fulfilled and sweetly expressed, you’re never quite sure to what extent their relationship is compromised at the core by the status of who they are and their obligations to the world in which they live.
Hotel del Luna / Alchemy of Souls (Hong Sisters)
Legends of fantasy romance, the Hong sisters have to be somewhere on any list of top Korean dramas. Jong-eun and Mi-ran’s 2019 effort Hotel del Luna is a definite contender. Pixie music superstar IU (Lee Ji-eun) is impressively nasty and menacing as millennium-old, vampish, bored and corrupt ice maiden Jang Man-wol, despite a weakness for luxury western brands and the ‘puppy face’ of Yeo Jin-goo as Gu Chan-sung, whose task it is to finally ease her off to the afterlife via a fraught but heart-rending love affair. Although flush with gorgeous Korean cuisine and the exquisitely ‘yeppeun’ Jang Man-wol donning a hundred perfectly accessorised outfits in 16 episodes, ghosts are not incidental in Hotel del Luna. It’s their stories of loss and redemption that power the emotional heart of this delicious tonally mixed tale.
In 2022, the Hong sisters finally burnt off anything superfluous and wrote the ultimate silk, sorcery and swooning love-fest with Part 2 of Alchemy of Souls. Part 1 puts redemption front and centre as Naksu’s (Jung So-min) hate filled vengeance mission is paused by the alchemy of souls which robs her of her power and gives her time to know her enemies as people and fall in love with one of them. However, for the season break cliff-hanger, the Hong Sisters fell into a habitual pattern by comprehensively shafting the redemption arc in favour of gratuitous action. Hwayugi (A Korean Odyssey) is a trail-blazer here with the Hongs skilfully building the love chemistry between Samdang and the Monkey King only for the ending to suddenly collapse into prosaic, by rote ‘thrills’. Rather like a grand romance settling for a quick screw behind the bike-sheds as a climax. Similarly, Naksu gets arbitrarily possessed by the main villain and goes on a murder spree shredding eighteen well written episodes of her redemptive arc of slow burning love for an orgy of lazy writing, complete with late appearing bells and spells and sudden ‘ah-ha’ moments, to facilitate a tedious blood-soaked finale.
The second part of Alchemy offers salvation with a major reset but takes a risk in swapping Jung So-min out as Naksu. The real triumph of Part 2 is the electric chemistry between Lee Jae-wook as Jang Uk and the born again Naksu, played by Go Youn-jung. Both actors deserve credit here and the script deftly organises the material in her favour but naturally all eyes are on Go Youn-jung and she rises to the challenge admirably. Part 2 is really a proto-romance, the fantasy historical setting promotes the exercise of romance archetypes while making plenty of space for contextualising them critically. For example, Jin Bin-yeon / Naksu in her amnesia state is frequently in ‘Damsel in Distress’ mode, except that she’s never quite helpless. Jang Uk encounters her for the first time in a magically concealed luxury dungeon (a real medieval one not a BDSM one), the interior of which could easily represent Rapunzel’s tower as well as any stone encasement for a beautiful woman in folklore. Not to be caught snoozing with puckered lips, she attacks him first with a toasting fork. Apart from an obvious instant attraction, he is indifferent to her fate and leaves after providing her with the tools to escape. This establishes Bin-yeon’s distinctive MO: this damsel doesn’t wait to be rescued; she makes her own get away.
The drama flirts with its archetypes, giving us guilty pleasures but saving our female-agency consciences at the same time. It’s Jin Bin-yeon who’s up for sex at the first opportunity and Jang Uk who plays the moral prude. She endures horrific physical pain to maintain her freedom as Jang Uk’s wife (nice irony played out there) and is shrewdly agile in the face of her dead rival’s hold on him, despite, or partly as a consequence of, wearing her emotional vulnerability on her delicate silk hanbok sleave. Part Two works hard to maintain an unbelievable level of tension in the main couple’s romance, convincingly exploding a powerful sense of their mutual attraction / obsession with each other, and then throwing every plot device imaginable at them to prevent them consummating it. Phew! — vicarious pleasure indeed.
The Korean title of Alchemy of Souls translates as ‘Wedding’, which, of course, must be the indispensable super-goal of any proto-romance. It’s the ambiguous binding ceremony that casts a shadow, ironic, critical or unreconstructed, even in its absence, over all love matches. Alchemy contains a few marriages but that between the main couple is actually marvellous. Not at the end but at a significant juncture, it’s a perfect work of emotional simplicity. Loaded with meaning but full of air and light, it’s a masterpiece that transcends cliché by fully embodying the sentimental core of the quintessential wedding, with a couple not so much happy as fully in the moment, calm and focussed. Reader, I cried a little.
Itaewon Class
Itaewon Class is not perfect but it comes close. An object lesson in how to do a love triangle is beautifully blended with a superlative demonstration of the revenge drama with a full service of Korean cuisine on the side. A love triangle is a tricky thing to negotiate dramatically; how much energy should you expend on a character who ultimately comes off second best before it gets irritating. The boundary between sympathy for an unrequited love and annoyance at stalkerish transgression can become wafer thin over 16 in-depth episodes. Watch Jung Il-woo step over that line in The Moon Embracing The Sun or go modern with Park Byung-eun in Oh My Baby. Itaewon turns the triangle dynamic on its head and invites us to invest without judgement in both legs. Both the women in Park Saeroyi’s (Park Seo-joon) life are well worthy of twenty hours of our total attention. Fully rounded, flawed, human and packed with agency, it’s genuinely possible to be satisfied with all possible romantic outcomes for these two fascinating characters. Kim Da-mi gives a blistering performance as borderline sociopath Jo Yi-seo gripped relentlessly by a personality changing passion and Kwon Nara burst into leading roles on the back of her adept performance as the morally compromised and emotionally ambivalent Oh Soo-ah.
The reliance on violence in the denouement is a little disappointing and the diversity of marginalised characters is welcome although a tad clumsy in the delivery, but these small flaws are amply compensated by the tightness of the script and the strengths of the cast. The trajectory of the narrative, in both the love triangle and the revenge drama, is structural rather than laced with authorial arbitrariness. This gives the movements of affection between the main characters a beautiful balance and their interactions become fascinating to watch. The viewer need for relentless narrative development is suspended along with the frustration that so often attaches to the triangle pivot’s non commitment, wilful blindness and obfuscation. Even the love rival frenemy trope benefits from this revisioning as the way in which the two women’s spikey, testy interactions cover up their fundamental admiration for each other is wryly charming but never cute: after all they do agree on one very important thing.
It’s Okay to Not Be Okay
K-dramas have a certain fondness for the dangerous female and Seo Yea-ji as Ko Moon-young is well up for dispensing nerve shredding pain, both physical and emotional, to the man (Kim Soo-hyun) to whom she takes a fancy in this perverse psychological thriller — come — melodrama. Alas, like many a steady-eyed, nothing-to-lose wild woman, as the soft, selfless love of her ensnared male soothes Ko Moon-young’s troubled psyche, she risks the dilution of the perceptive edge, killer instinct and poor impulse control that made her so compelling in the first place. However, in a longform ensemble piece, it can’t help but get to something deeper, including the sometimes pivotal role of pity in the entanglements of love. Having attitude and dispensing hard truths are not Ko Moon-young’s only defences against her childhood induced PTSD, she’s also got an extensive range of stunning outfits, a comprehensive appreciation of her own beauty and an advanced metaphorical armoury of fairy tales, both cannon and of her own devising: she’s a children’s author. The tales, which often augment the drama through animation, coincidentally highlight the central problem: delightfully bleak and uncompromising at the outset, by the time we get to the final story, the darkness has evaporated. However, like a contemporary Korean Liz Taylor, Seo Yea-ji walks the shadow line with skill preserving something awkward throughout. Throwing in a Japanese-colonial style creepy mansion, a mental health setting and an autistic brother should make it a mess but instead It’s Okay to Not Be Okay is both thrilling to watch and emotionally satisfying.
Buy five, get one free.
Nevertheless is a beautifully choreographed ballet of looks, breaths and touches that gives a rare phenomenological take on what it means for a young woman to be gripped by an overwhelming erotic attraction. A marvellous union of writer (Jung Won), direction (Kim Ga-ram) and Han So-hee is sensational as Yu Na-bi, showing us the full, centred, emotional scope of a great actor in progress. The sharply portrayed full-frontal toxic masculinity assault in the first five minutes leaves Ya Nu-bi uncertain how to read her subsequent romantic encounters with a fellow student. The abusive affair, together with a lack of contrasting experience, leaves Nu-bi doubting herself and her new man and only sure of the strength of feeling inside her body. Nu-bi faces an unavoidable confrontation with the essential mystery of the other. It’s no accident the action takes place within a community of sculpture students who wrestle daily with the ambiguities of the physical form in space.
A great ensemble cast of young actors get the triangles and subsidiary romances to sizzle, including a nuanced but erotically staid lesbian coming out tale. Sang Kang is making ‘still-waters run deep’, vague but gorgeous guys his forte but he’s right on point here as Park Jae-eon, gradually ensnared by the unwitting Yu Na-bi’s sincerity even as he lets his own metaphorically loaded actual butterflies go literally free (‘Na-bi’ means ‘butterfly’). It’s rare for a Korean romance to be set within a sexually engaged and curious group of young people; watch out for the overly detailed explanation of Tinder. K-drama youth are invariably awkward, shy and clueless in matters of the heart and unnervingly asexual. In contrast, Han So-hee and Song Kang blow up the screen with exquisitely charged exchanges of emotion and desire.
Available to stream in the UK: Hellbound (Netflix): The Red Sleave (Viki); Dae Jang Geum (Kocowa+); Hotel del Luna (Netflix, Viki); Alchemy of Souls (Netflix); Hwayugi (Viki, Netflix — A Korean Odyssey); Itaewon Class (Netflix); The Moon Embracing The Sun (Netflix, Viki); Oh My Baby (Viki); It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (Netflix); Nevertheless (Netflix). Subscriptions required: Netflix, Kocowa+.
