Bullet Point Review: Mystic Pop-Up Bar
Published in
3 min readNov 18, 2020
- Amongst fantasy dramas, spirits, deities, shamanism, and Korean folklore are a subgenre of their own, particularly Hong Sisters’ filmography contributing to its popularity. But Mystic Pop-Up Bar feels mightily reminiscent of their most recent work — Hotel Del Luna. Most dramas set in the supernatural realm generally tend to have similar setups, but there is too much common here to ignore it as a need of the subgenre. In both the dramas, the main leads are spirits sentenced to serve ghosts (in a hotel there)/ humans (through a cart bar here) as a punishment for their sins. The tragedy that caused them to commit those said sins, results in the death of a loved one, the entirety of which is revealed over multiple flashbacks. There is a network of deities, spirits, grim reapers operating amongst humans, a sacred tree, and a human who acts as a bridge between the spirit and living realm. However, Mystic Pop-Up Bar adopts a slapstick tone, which sets it worlds apart from the former. While Hotel De Luna was occasional humourous, it had an undercurrent of melancholy running throughout due to its subject matter of dealing with the dead. Here, Wol Ju (a spirited — pun intended — Hwang Jung Eum) has to settle a hundred thousand grudges of ‘humans’, till she can get re-incarnated. So, she uses her bar’s setting to get her customers to spill out their worries and then goes about fixing them, like a fairy godmother.
- The reasoning for this could be the budget, but the drama even with its supernatural characters gives an earthly feeling. In Hotel Del Luna, the hotel itself is a character, with its grandeur decor, unlimited floors with unlimited rooms catering to an assortment of ghosts, all radiating an other-worldly aura. The cart bar in comparison is more intimate, with Wol Ju, Manager Gwi (a fantastic Choi Won Young), and Han Kang Bae (a lovable Yook Sung Jae), sitting down and grabbing a drink with their troubled customers. In a much later episode, an important confrontation scene also takes place at the bar. But it’s not just the setting, it’s the characters as well. We rarely see Wol Ju use her powers (if she had any). She is always seen getting groceries, chopping vegetables, cooking, cleaning, presenting to us an image, not of a 500-year-old spirit, but that of a mother or grandmother who cooks your favourite dishes, listens to your worries but also scolds you when you do something wrong.
- The slapstick tone was hard to get used to initially. Many comic scenes felt like they belonged more in a sketch than in an hour-long episode, particularly the one segment involving a sports day for the spirits. Though the idea could have sounded hysterical on paper, in reality, the scene drags on for far too long, with characters we know nothing about. Later on, in the same episode, Wol Ju even breaks the fourth wall, to deliver a lesson, as if a public service announcement. These multiple shifts in style and tone are jarring and keep the show from finding its footing. In some instances, it even delayed the plot from getting to the episodic cases.
Yet, as the story progressed and the show eventually found the right balance of humour, emotions, and the eerie, I started to appreciate these very parts that I didn’t enjoy earlier. I could see how the comedy was necessary for the characters (and us) to have fun, as the second half progresses into darker and more emotional territory. So, these scenes let the characters just be, and not only be present in service of the story.
