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James Marsh

2/5 stars
Just weeks after steaming up our screens as a sultry siren in the erotic thriller Hidden Face, actress Park Ji-hyun is back in Forbidden Fairytale, but her role here could not be more different.
In this bubbly and lighthearted Korean romantic comedy from director Lee Jong-suk (The Negotiation), Park plays Dan-bi, who works for the government’s Youth Protection Team reviewing an endless stream of hard-core pornography.
By night, she dreams of following in her late father’s footsteps by writing wholesome children’s fairy tales.


Following a traffic altercation in which she damages a publisher’s vintage car, Dan-bi is cajoled into penning sexually explicit adult fiction to pay for the repairs, and inadvertently becomes an overnight sensation.
Forbidden Fairytale wields its amusing premise with plenty of enthusiasm. It is also crammed with so many wild subplots and side characters that it might have worked better as a K-drama series, where its tangle of convoluted ideas could have been fleshed out more coherently.
There are simply too many distracting conflicts obscuring the intriguing central notion of a naive artist finding her calling in an altogether more salacious medium.
Crucially, for a film selling itself on the titillating premise of online erotica, the film shows a disappointingly prudish attitude.

There are some amusing sequences along the way, mostly those that dramatise the steamy tales of forbidden fornication that are fed to Dan-bi by her more worldly friends, played by Hwang Se-on and Seol Woo-in.
But any attempt to have a serious, adult conversation about the role of pornography in society, or even the importance of detailed sex education, is swiftly sidestepped.
Rather than examine South Korea’s famously hardline attitudes towards sex with any insight or interest, the premise is merely an excuse to throw naive dreamer Dan-bi together with potential love interest Jung-seok (Choi Si-won), a civil service colleague struggling with erectile dysfunction.
They make an affable couple, but their bumbling inexperience in the arena of physical courtship is just wholly implausible for two urban singles in their thirties.

Conversely, the characters peddling explicit online pornography are portrayed here as deceitful, conniving villains who create their content solely through violent, non-consensual and criminal means.
Forbidden Fairytale is arriving at a moment when Sean Baker’s Anora is being enthusiastically lauded for its humanising and compassionate portrayal of sex workers, and Bridget Jones continues to divulge the intimate details of her bumbling hookups.
This film’s attempts to be genuinely risqué come off as endearing at best, but dangerously closed-minded at worst.
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Choi Si-won as Jung-seok (top) and Park Ji-hyun as Dan-bi in a still from Forbidden Fairytale (category III; Korean), directed by Lee Jong-suk.

Park Ji-hyun as Dan-bi in a still from Forbidden Fairytale.

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Park Ji-hyun plays a youth protection officer who starts writing pornography to pay for car repairs in this non-risqué erotic comedy


Park Ji-hyun plays a youth protection officer who starts writing pornography to pay for car repairs in this non-risqué erotic comedy.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Park Ji-hyun plays a youth protection officer who starts writing pornography to pay for car repairs in this non-risqué erotic comedy

Park Ji-hyun plays a youth protection officer who starts writing pornography to pay for car repairs in this non-risqué erotic comedy