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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Na In-woo, Kim Ji-eun, Kwon Yool
Latest Nielsen rating: 1.83 per cent
City prosecutors, rural detectives and serial killers collide in Longing for You, a new Korean drama that seesaws between investigative thriller, family drama and love triangle.
Na In-woo, Kim Ji-eun and Kwon Yool make up the three points of that triangle, as stock K-drama characters that are in stark contrast to one another but together form the same familiar structure.


The lovable rogue among them is Na’s Oh Jin-sang, a rural detective working in the police force of his hometown, Woojin, which has never once dealt with a murder case – until the end of this show’s first episode.
By then, Seoul prosecutors Cha Young-woon (Kwon) and Go Young-joo (Kim) already have their hands full with a joint murder investigation. The Woojin case makes it three – they have a serial killer on their hands.
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Young-joo is the first to pick up the killer’s scent, when she is assigned the case of a woman murdered at an art gallery. This victim, like those that will follow, was drugged with ketamine and then had her Achilles tendon sliced open before her corpse was left slumped over a banister, “hung like laundry” as the investigators repeatedly describe it.
Young-joo is the chip-on-the-shoulder type. She is originally from Woojin – she is chummy with Jin-sang and his younger brother Oh Jin-woo (Ren) – and pulled herself up by her bootstraps to get where she is today.
As a result, she is exceptionally confident but also quite aggressive, especially when she is interrogating people like her main suspect, the slimy dentist Bae Min-gyu (Jung Sang-hoon).

Though he does not seem at all affected by the death, Min-gyu is the victim’s husband and he is confident that his rich family’s connections will bail him out.
Speaking of rich families, Young-joo’s senior Young-woon also hails from a well-to-do family – he is the heir of the influential business Jinjin Group.
He is seen as an expert on murder cases and is looked up to by everyone in the prosecutor’s office, but he also has a serious heart condition that his mother and a private doctor constantly monitor from a secret surveillance room in the family’s palatial home.

When Young-woon discovers a case that looks eerily similar to Young-joo’s, he goes over her head and sets up a joint investigation team which she is vexed to learn he will lead. To his credit, when she unearths a vital clue, he ups her to co-team leader alongside him.
The subsequent Woojin case welcomes Jin-sang into the fold and there is soon a clash of egos between these two men in Young-joo’s life. Tempers then fray when Young-woon drags in the fresh-faced Jin-woo as a suspect.
On the family side of things we have Jin-sang’s unit, which includes Jin-woo, who spends a lot of his time making food for the people in his life, and his handful of a mother, Hong Young-hee (Jang Hye-jin) – we first meet her in an illegal gambling house, where she is arrested by her son.

This is the earthy family we identify with. The best moment is when Jin-sang gets thrown into the cell beside his mother for beating up a suspect and they both start complaining about the food to his colleagues. But, by and large, the characterisations are rather broad.
Meanwhile, Jin-woo is off in his own world. Kind, attractive and pensive, he sticks out like a sore thumb in Woojin. The show slows down into a K-pop-music-video-style montage when he mysteriously goes around visiting locations that later turn out to be murder sites.
As for Young-woon, his obsessively caring mother is Yoo Jung-sook (Bae Jong-ok), while his typically supercilious chaebol-owning father is Cha Jin-cheol (Choi Kwang-il). This family lives in a world that is supposed to be out of our reach, but the tone of their lifestyle, not to mention the monitoring of Young-woon’s heart condition, borders on the ridiculous.

These family elements will surely get filled in to some degree further down the line, which leaves the investigation as the main thread in the early episodes. Alas, it is not the most exciting one.
The serial killer’s modus operandi is a very familiar one, particularly the slumped bodies – Bong Joon-ho’s 2009 film Mother memorably used the same visual – but here it looks unintentionally silly. After the intricate crime scenes of recent shows like Connect and A Superior Day, the murders feel somewhat pedestrian.
The brewing love triangle will surely eventually take pride of place, but with the elements around it as slapdash as they are, the show’s prospects are not particularly bright.
Longing for You is streaming on Viu.


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K-drama Longing for You: Na In-woo, Kim Ji-eun lead thriller overstuffed with family and love triangle elements

Na In-woo as rural detective Oh Jin-sang in a still from “Longing for You”. The K-drama sees three people in law enforcement attempt to track down a serial killer.

Ren as Oh Jin-woo in a still from “Longing for You”.

Kim Ji-eun (left) as Go Young-joo and Kwon Yool as Cha Young-woon in a still from “Longing for You”.

Kim Ji-eun as Go Young-joo in a still from “Longing for You”.

Kwon Yool as Cha Young-woon in a still from “Longing for You”.

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Kim Tae-ri (left) and Oh Jung-se as occult sleuths Gu San-yeong and Yeom Hae-sang, respectively, in a still from “Revenant”.

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Choi Soo-young (left) as police lieutenant Kim Jin-hee and Park Sung-hoon as her police partner and superior Eun Jae-won in a still from “Not Others”.

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Longing for You seesaws between investigative thriller, family drama and love triangle as three people in law enforcement attempt to track down a serial killer
Na In-woo, Kim Ji-eun and Kwon Yool star as the trio in this K-drama, which so far feels somewhat pedestrian and lacklustre despite the murders


Na In-woo, Kim Ji-eun and Kwon Yool lead Longing for You, a somewhat pedestrian K-drama series that seesaws between investigative thriller, family drama and love triangle.
