Let's just cut right to it, this show was painfully boring. There, I said it. A story built around partial amnesia has real potential, but between the choppy scene structure and random flashbacks thrown in constantly, the whole plot ends up feeling more tangled than it needed to be. The romance doesn't fare much better either, it's written so poorly that I never really found myself invested in this couple. Both leads come across stiff on screen and deliver their lines in a really awkward way. The show runs 8 episodes, each somewhere around 30 to 35 minutes. Hanuel, a 29 year old language teacher, wakes up after an accident only to realize his memory stops at age 19. It turns out he'd been in another accident back then too, which is why his memories cut off at that point. He has zero recollection of the fact that he's currently living with his childhood friend Saebyeok, who's now a huge celebrity. That makes the whole situation even harder for Hanuel to wrap his ...
The plot follows two young guys, Viet and Nam, who scrape by doing brutal manual labor deep down inside coal mines. Money is tight, yet they manage to stay happy together as a couple, sneaking away on the job to share secret looks, quick kisses, and the occasional physical encounter in the shadows when nobody is around. Nam lives with his widowed mom, a woman deeply haunted by her late husband who went missing in action and whose remains were never recovered. She claims to possess spiritual intuition and constantly brings up feeling his ghost nearby, while quietly observing her son's close bond with Viet without pressing for details, opting instead to warmly welcome Viet to dinner as her subtle way of approving. All around them, locals are abandoning the grueling mine work for better prospects elsewhere, and Nam dreams of making that same leap, yet he is paralyzed by the thought of abandoning either his mom or his boyfriend. He ends up torn between pursuing a new life abroad or sticking around to be with the man he loves.
Honestly, it felt to me like the movie cared way more about the lingering trauma of war on future generations than it did about the romance itself. That whole subplot involving Nam's mom really highlights how fresh those emotional scars still are for people. Even though he never actually knew his dad, Nam feels this deep pull to discover how and where he died, so before he sneaks out of Vietnam, he sets off on a trek alongside his mother, her companion, and Viet to track down the exact spot where his father lost his life. Meanwhile, the romance between Viet and Nam exists in its own separate space, playing out mostly inside the dark mines where they express their passion and whisper about what comes next, with those moments captured in a very raw and gentle way. The big issue is that this relationship barely gets twenty minutes of screen time out of a two hour runtime, and I will be straight with you, I was bored out of my mind through the vast majority of it. Outside of a few quick kisses and a single passionate moment, you really do not get much actual romance at all. Unsurprisingly, local censors banned the project entirely in its home country. I just was not in the mood for something this relentlessly grim, and the tragic part is that having so little queer content means it will fail to attract a gay fanbase while simultaneously pushing away traditional moviegoers who avoid those themes altogether. Top that off with a depressing conclusion, and it becomes totally obvious this was crafted specifically to chase awards at places like Cannes.
It is a gloomy, confusing festival piece that completely loses track of its main couple, so I definitely would not suggest putting yourself through it. (3/10)
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