Netflix K-drama See You in My 19th Life: Shin Hye-sun, Ahn Bo-hyun lead fantastical romcom about a reincarnated woman chasing past love
Lead cast: Shin Hye-sun, Ahn Bo-hyun, Ha Yoon-kyung, Ahn Dong-goo
Latest Nielsen rating: 5.49 per cent
Almost two-and-a-half years after the finale of Mr. Queen, Shin Hye-sun returns to screens, alongside Ahn Bo-hyun (Military Prosecutor Doberman), in the new TvN drama See You in My 19th Life, streaming globally on Netflix.
Shin’s previous show was a period drama and this one is set in the present day, yet there are clear parallels between the two: in both series, she plays a self-possessed character who benefits from having all the hindsight (or foresight) from having lived as a different person at a different time.
In Mr. Queen Shin played a male chef from the present who took all his know-how with him back in time to the era of Joseon dynastic rule in Korea. See You in My 19th Life, which is based on a popular webtoon of the same name, takes this concept but ups the ante considerably.
Shin plays Ban Ji-eum, a character that, as the title suggests, has already lived 18 lives before this one – and she remembers everything about them.
In each new life – in which she is born into a new body, either male or female – she regains the memories of her past lives at some point between the ages of eight and 12.
At the age of nine during her 19th life, Ji-eum (played as a child by Park So-yi) regains those memories, but, unlike in her previous incarnations, this time she immediately has a goal. She wants to find Mun Seo-ha (Jeong Hyun-jun), the boy she loved as a child before she perished in a car crash at age 12.
Her 19th life is a difficult one, but after running away from her degenerate father she tracks down Kim Ae-gyeong (Cha Chung-hwa), who was her young niece during her 17th life.
After convincing Ae-gyeong of who she is, she starts to live with her at her snack shop and gets the pocket money she needs to make her way to the hillside mansion where she fell in love with Seo-ha, who is now a high-school boy, played by Ahn Bo-hyun.
But Seo-ha then moves to Germany, so a determined Ji-eum commits herself to her studies in hopes of getting a job with conglomerate MI Group, which is run by Seo-ha’s strict father, Man Jeong-hoon (Choi Jin-ho).
Years later, Ji-eum, now played by Shin Hye-sun, is a test driver for the MI Group. She has not succeeded in earning a transfer to Germany, but it doesn’t matter, as one day she learns that Seo-ha is returning. He’s coming back to run the MI Hotel, which used to be run by his late mother.
Rather than tell Seo-ha who she is, Ji-eum approaches him very aggressively looking for a job. Seo-ha is flustered by this young woman who casually says things to him like “do you wanna date me?” and “marry me”.
She gets the job and proceeds to hound him day in, day out. Unfortunately, she may have some competition, as florist Yoon Cho-won (Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s Ha Yoon-kyung) is also pining after Seo-ha. Cho-won was Ji-eum’s sister in her previous life.
Shin gender-swapped in her role in Mr. Queen and in effect she does so again here, as Seo-ha is a delicate flower with impaired hearing and PTSD. She’s the one who grabs him by the arm and yanks him down an alley or fends off unwanted pariahs with her extroverted dance moves, not the other way around.
See You in My 19th Life is pure fantasy, one that adds a hyper-K-drama twist to the fairy-tale formula. But beneath all the schmaltz and endless romcom stereotypes lies a romance that may raise a few eyebrows.
Ju-won – Ji-eum’s name in her 18th life – was 12 (and played by Kim Si-a of Kill Boksoon) when she fell in love with 10-year-old Seo-ha, but given that all her memories and experiences from the past 1,000 years are intact, this adds a somewhat creepy undertone to their sweet courtship.
The premiere week of See You in My 19th Life is filled with verve and colour, but it’s also a manic co*cktail whose overflowing energy feels like it’s compensating for a story trading in tired clichés.
It’s a far cry from the last two shows, both superior, from the series’ director Lee Na-yeong: Mine and season one of Love Alarm.
See You in My 19th Life is streaming on Netflix.
