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Pierce Conran

This article contains spoilers.
1.5/5 stars
Lead cast: Jung Ji-so, Kim Hae-sook, Jung Jin-young
Latest Nielsen rating: 3.4 per cent
Eleven years ago, Oh Mal-soon emerged out of nowhere on the big screen and captured our hearts and imaginations in the Lunar New Year fantasy romcom hit Miss Granny.
Warm and heartfelt, the film was not the kind of work you would expect from writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk, if all you were familiar with before watching it was his 2021 sensation Squid Game.


Following a string of foreign adaptations, Mal-soon returned to Korean screens this year in the K-drama adaptation Who Is She.
When the show begins, the story largely follows the same beats as its progenitor. Mal-soon (Kim Hae-sook, Strong Girl Nam-soon) is a curmudgeonly 70-year-old woman living with her grown-up child’s family.
In the film that family comprises her son, daughter-in-law and grandson (played by Jung Jin-young, who plays a different character here), while in the drama the genders for the characters are flipped.
She leaves home one night after a fight with her family and winds up in a mysterious photographic shop which magically turns her back into her 20-year-old self.

With a new lease on life, she pursues her dream of becoming a singer, which she had abandoned – joining her grandson’s indie rock band in the film, becoming a K-pop trainee alongside her granddaughter in the drama.
With so much more schedule real estate to fill up, things start to get a little different after that. There are lots of new side characters, who are frequently colourful but seldom well integrated into the story.
There are also a couple of other magical transformations. These include that of K-pop trainee Emily, who at first looks like the 20-year-old Mal-soon before turning into an older woman.
There is also the youthful transformation of Mal-soon’s friend Park Gab-young (Jung Bo-suk) – it only happens as a post-credit gag in the film – which gives Who Is She an unconvincing love triangle.

This bloated midsection blows out several poorly thought-out elements into a curiously distended narrative that lacks emotional weight and struggles to justify its existence, let alone make much sense.
Still, a lot can be forgiven with a strong ending, and given Miss Granny’s touching and satisfying conclusion, one would imagine that even a facsimile of it would achieve a similar effect.
In this case we’ll never know; Who Is She spins its wheels until it almost runs out of time and then skids past the finish line with a new ending, which is as abrupt as it is thoroughly ill-conceived.
In the original, Mal-soon forfeited her youth to save her grandchild after an accident, giving him her blood when no one else’s was available. The grandson lives, his band prospers, and the elderly Mal-soon watches happily from the banisters, her family restored.

In Who Is She, Mal-soon manages to repair her relationship with her daughter, who eventually figures out that Oh Doo-ri (Jung Ji-so, The Cursed), the trainee friend of her daughter Choi Ha-na (Chae Won-bin, Doubt), is in fact her mother.
Mal-soon also gets to fulfil her dream of debuting as a singer alongside Ha-na, their family beaming with pride from their seats.
But then the show does not really know what to do. Her flirtation with music producer Daniel Han (Jung Jin-young) gets a lot more screen time here, and while the drama is clearly very focused on it, it does not know how to resolve it.
Mal-soon is given a choice by the mysterious taxi driver who brought her to the photo shop in the first place – return to your former self or stay as the younger Oh Doo-ri for six months before ceasing to exist.

The show tries to keep us in suspense as to what she decides, only to reveal a few minutes before the end of the series that Mal-soon was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s even before her transformation.
In the show’s closing scene, she meets Daniel again while working as a barista. Although she smiles at him, it isn’t clear whether she recognises him. Head-scratchingly, this appears to happen a year after the climax, long past the taxi driver’s six-month deadline.
This vague ending, which attempts to keep the romance alive without addressing any of the messy emotions and morals of her transformation, is nothing short of a cop-out.
It is a lazy way to conclude the series without answering any questions – clearly they did not know how to.
This conclusion is the narrative equivalent of sweeping dust under the carpet. No wonder it felt so rushed. In the end, the show could not even answer its titular question – who is she?
Who Is She is streaming on Viu.


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The story of a grumpy grandmother who magically turns into her 20-year-old self becomes bloated here, and the show’s ending is a cop-out


The story of a grumpy grandmother who magically turns into her 20-year-old self becomes bloated here, and the show’s ending is a cop-out.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The story of a grumpy grandmother who magically turns into her 20-year-old self becomes bloated here, and the show’s ending is a cop-out

The story of a grumpy grandmother who magically turns into her 20-year-old self becomes bloated here, and the show’s ending is a cop-out