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https://scmp.com/lifestyle/k-pop/k-drama/article/3156176/k-drama-midseason-recap-reflection-you-dull-netflix-romance K-drama
K-drama midseason recap: Reflection of You – dull Netflix romance can’t do justice to artful metaphors
- The Korean drama series starts off with an intriguing mystery, but soon gets bogged down with a meandering storyline
- The lack of chemistry between the tortured artists at the centre of the story only adds to the feeling of a wasted plot premise
Shin Hyun-been in a still from Netflix K-drama Reflection of You.
This article contains spoilers.
Art and romance have long been great bedfellows, but despite featuring plenty of both, the brooding K-drama Reflection of You has been curiously bereft of either emotion, and of any beauty.
The tone is one of anguished romance and the three main leads are all tormented artists to varying degrees, but nothing feels right in this plodding melodrama that has grown more leaden and meandering with each episode.
When the series started, we were presented with an intriguing mystery. Successful artist and family woman Jeong Hee-joo (Go Hyun-jung) has her stable life turned upside down when Gu Hae-won (Shin Hyun-been), a figure from her past, re-enters her life. Hae-won’s actions, which begin with a slap to Hee-joo’s daughter’s face, are aggressive and hint at some bad blood in their shared history.
We soon learn that Hae-won was Hee-joo’s art tutor and, of course, there was a man. Seo Woo-jae (Kim jae-young) was engaged to Hae-won but had eyes for Hee-joo, who he also tutored. Hazy flashbacks of Hee-joo and Woo-jae in idyllic green hills in Ireland allow us to fill in the rest.
Woo-jae returns at the end of episode four as a hot new artist at the gallery that shows Hee-joo’s work. At the beginning of the next episode we discover that Woo-jae has amnesia. He doesn’t remember Hee-joo but he is now living with Hae-won, and the pair are married, if in a somewhat platonic relationship.
It’s at this point that the story starts to slow to a crawl. Owing to an endless parade of dreamy flashbacks, viewers can easily piece together what has transpired between the three characters, and that the little baby in the Irish cottage is Hee-joo’s son Ho-su (Kim Dong-ha), thus Woo-jae’s as well.
Hae-won is vengeful but also desperate to recapture Woo-jae’s heart. Hee-joo’s husband, An Hyeon-seong (Choi Won-young), is also implicated in all of this as he was secretly caring for a mystery man in Ireland who he then brought to Korea. The mystery man was of course Woo-jae, and the reason he was bedridden is that he was hit by a car, with Hyeon-seong behind the wheel.
That’s the gist of the main story and, aside from a few minor supporting plot lines, including Hee-joo’s angst-ridden teenage daughter Lisa (Kim Su-an) acting out and her overbearing mother-in-law Park Young-sun (Kim Bo-yeon) being an awful family corporation matriarch – a K-drama necessity that feels particularly superfluous here – it’s not enough to keep this 16-episode series rolling.
Go Hyun-jung as Jeong Hee-joo in a still from Reflection of You.
Over six episodes, Hee-joo has repeatedly met Woo-jae, occasionally by design but most often by chance, and we are forced to wait interminably for the inevitable to happen. Granted, delayed gratification can be very satisfying, but the build-up here is a dreary mess of repetitive scenes.
There’s no sense of chemistry, let alone of undying romance, between any of these characters, and Woo-jae is such a lame duck it’s extraordinary that two women as capable and attractive as Hee-joo and Hae-won would fight over him, let alone put their careers and/or families on the line for him.
The most significant event in the midseason stretch is Hae-won and Woo-jae’s “marriage”. Since the pair are already betrothed, it’s really just an excuse for Hae-won to publicly lay claim to Woo-jae. Her choice of venue, the art gallery that connects them all, is also another way to get back at Hee-joo.
Hee-joo insists she won’t attend the wedding, but her buried feelings compel her to anyway, and on the day itself she skulks behind a glass window on the second floor, perusing the gathering in the garden below – that is, until Woo-jae appears in the building. Before we know it, the pair have stolen away for a forbidden kiss.
The most interesting aspect of Reflection of You, though that isn’t saying much, is its use of art and nature to evoke the underlying feelings of the characters, particularly Hee-joo.
Kim Jae-young (left) and Shin Hyun-been in a still from Reflection of You.
We learn that Hee-joo’s popular landscape paintings were inspired by sounds she used to hear in Ireland which traumatised her, sounds which Woo-jae suggested she try to put into her art.
Among those sounds was a phantom church bell which, as Woo-jae explains to Ho-su – whose name means lake – when he finally meets him, belongs to a church which was submerged in a lake in Sligo county in Ireland and can still be heard.
In the present, this art is a lingering testament to Hee-joo’s guilt over taking another man’s husband and abandoning her own, as well as her dormant feelings for Woo-jae which are steadily being awoken.
However elegant if imperfect a metaphor it may be, it sadly hasn’t translated into a believable or compelling on-screen romance, forbidden or otherwise.
Kim Jae-young (left) and Go Hyun-jung in a still from Reflection of You.
Reflection of You is streaming on Netflix.