What a view | Netflix K-drama Love Alarm returns for season two, ramping up the romance
- Reprising their roles, Kim So-hyun, Song Kang and Kim Si-eun are engaged in an awkward love triangle
- Maybe the sly genius of Love Alarm is that life’s best bits are not reducible to an algorithm
Alarm bells – well, apps – are ringing in near-future Seoul, with love in the air and a telltale throbbing in the trouser pocket.
Yes, Love Alarm is back for a 2.0 Netflix series and, ramped up from series one, the cutesiness is in overload mode, the dreamy-creamy lovey-doveyness is on ultra-soppy setting and the soft-focus, slow-motion lovers’ gazes drown viewers in candyfloss.
But maybe that’s the sly genius of Love Alarm: perhaps life’s best bits should not be reducible to an algorithm on a mobile phone. Perhaps, whipping it out at the merest vibration shouldn’t amount to the greatest excitement you’ll have each day (notwithstanding the infernal jingle that accompanies every throb).
Users of the Love Alarm app can detect current squeezes and potential admirers within 10 metres, but because student Jojo (Kim So-hyun) has installed a blocker, complications have arisen. Jojo and Hye-young (Jung Ga-ram) have mismatched Love Alarms, so it’s unclear who really has the hots for whom – which lets sulky, rich, entitled pretty-boy model Sun-oh (Song Kang) into an awkward love triangle … and never mind his doting girlfriend, Yuk-jo (Kim Si-eun), who deserves better.
Where digitisation dominates, conversation and empathy are dead.
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