K-drama Knight Flower: Lee Hanee packs a punch, and puts on a brave face, as a vigilante widow in period action comedy

Lead cast: Lee Hanee, Lee Jong-won, Kim Sang-joong, Lee Ki-woo Latest Nielsen rating: 8.2 per cent The past holds a strange sway over us. We love being transported back to earlier eras when people talked and dressed differently and society was arranged in ways hard to fathom today. Yet few of us would want to give up our creature comforts and modern social norms to switch places with those characters on screen. This paradox is thrown into particularly sharp relief in the new action comedy – and maybe romance? – Knight Flower set in the era of the Joseon dynasty’s rule over Korea and starring Lee Hanee, whose status as a widow makes her little more than a prisoner. Among the vicarious thrills for viewers watching period K-dramas are the resplendent costumes worn by the characters. However, compared to previous period drama leads, Lee’s protagonist, Jo Yeo-hwa, has a decidedly monochromatic wardrobe. The show opens at night with her clad in black clothing and a mask as she dashes over tiled roofs. She is heading to a notorious inn and gambling house, where she aims to teach a man a lesson for being a very irresponsible father and husband. 12 of the best new Korean drama series to watch in January 2024 In the inn she meets for the first time officer Park Soo-ho (Lee Jong-won), who has just caught someone in the act of stealing – but more on him later. Yeo-hwa leads a secret life at night, as a masked vigilante meting out justice for those unable to do so for themselves. In the daylight, she returns to her dutiful role as a grieving widow and is permanently clad in white. Orphaned at a young age, Yeo-hwa was set to marry the son of Left State Councillor Seok Ji-sung (Kim Sang-joong), but she became a widow on their wedding day before she even had a chance to meet him. For the past 15 years, she has been living under the roof of her strictly Confucian mother-in-law, Yoo Geum-ok (Kim Mi-kyung). She must always wear white, is never allowed to leave the house, must continue to grieve at her husband’s altar, and is often restricted to one meal a day. Her only escapes from the drudgery and unfairness of her situation are her nighttime escapades, which she achieves with the help of merchant house owner Jang So-woon (Yoon Sa-bong) and her long-suffering maidservant Yeon-sun (Park Se-hyun). Soo-ho is a decorated officer who has just been reassigned to Hanyang (Joseon era Seoul), where he quickly becomes a thorn in his superior’s side for his insistence on seeking out justice and ignoring social protocols. Following his first meeting with the masked Yeo-hwa, he soon meets daytime Yeo-hwa during one of her rare excursions with her mother-in-law. His interest is piqued after learning about a “legendary do-gooder” who anonymously helps people under the cover of dark. Given that both characters are fighting for justice, their paths begin to cross often and it is surely only a matter of time before Soo-ho puts two and two together. Although it follows a lightly episodic structure in which Yeo-hwa regularly has new people she needs to help, Knight Flower is chiefly interested in exploring her predicament as a woman who is suffocated by the strict moral codes of the day. Yet this is not a weighty drama – far from it. The tone is very light and the proceedings are jazzed up by the occasional action set-piece. Very much built around its star, Knight Flower affords Lee another chance to show her comic and physical skills, as we have seen her do before in shows like One the Woman and the Alienoid films (part two opened earlier this month in Korea). She channels Jackie Chan’s comedic martial arts style in her fight scenes, but most of the time she has to pretend to be a dutiful widow lest she incur the wrath of her mother-in-law, whose tales of bad widows having their arms severed or eyes plucked out give her nightmares. Despite her predicament, she puts on a brave face. When she is being harangued by family members, or occasionally even a fed-up Yeon-sun, she plugs in amusingly anachronistic wooden earplugs and flashes her well-practised but tired smile. Knight Flower has been refreshingly light on palace intrigue so far, but that is bound to ramp up in the coming episodes, not least because Kim Sang-joong and Lee Ki-woo, as the Left State Councillor and Park Soon-hak, a royal secretary who is also Soo-ho’s older brother, make up half the top-billed cast. Knight Flower is streaming on Viu.