What a view | Netflix’s Love Alarm – a sweet, starry-eyed romantic drama from South Korea
- Yes, there’s a love triangle, but the show also raises serious questions of privacy and safety in a social media-driven society
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Koreans, at least the southern variety, might be the most romantic folks in the world. They are perennial romance-drama gold medallists in a competitive field, finding love wherever they look. And they find it again in Love Alarm, whose eight-episode first series is now binge-ready on Netflix.
But there’s more to this young lovers’ starry-eyed heartstrings-puller than starry eyes and young love. True, there are a couple of straightforward-sounding, impossibly complicated and bitter love triangles. And, yes, girl loves boy, but new boy arrives who’s far too cool for school – literally – and the world falls off its axis. But, propelling such timeless problems is that curse of the modern world: the dating app.
Surely within the capabilities of smartphone software already (if not actually out there), the Love Alarm pings with soppy heart-shaped graphics when someone within 10 metres loves (or at least has the hots for) the user. How handy, you might think, with everyone in the entire country falling under the spell of this infernal piece of kit. Not so independent-minded Kim Jo-jo (Kim So-hyun), who can address the whole dating malarkey on her own terms, thanks, and doesn’t need the mutual bleeping that comes with imaginary, overlapping Venn diagrams of desire. And anyway, she’s too busy concealing family secrets.
The script and even soundtrack can be pure, melted cheese, but that shouldn’t obscure the pertinent questions Love Alarm addresses when it hits its stride: those of digital privacy, gay rights, how lovelorn victims of unrequited passion might be driven to suicide and how a small, usually black, oblong box can be everybody’s boss. All you need is love (alarm).