It’s nearly October, the best and spookiest time of year, and appropriately enough, Spooky in Love is on my radar. This drama was actually released in late July and ran through August, but I held off watching until the start of autumn, expecting…well, not this.
The premise is loosely based on a 2011 film starring Son Ye-Jin (Scandal) and Lee Min-Ki called Spellbound, featuring a protagonist who can see ghosts following an accident. Park Eun-Bin (Extraordinary Attorney Woo) stars as Cheon Yeo-Ri, a wealthy chaebol heiress and CEO of the Reina Hotel. Similar to Spellbound, Yeo-Ri is cursed with the ability to see ghosts, in this case acquired following an accident in which she falls off a yacht. She passes the curse along whenever she comes into physical contact with another person. At the beginning of the story, in a flashback, her fiancé breaks off their engagement due to receiving the curse when presenting Yeo-Ri with an engagement ring. She lives in solitude, avoiding contact with others, for the next decade.
Starring opposite Park Eun-Bin is Yang Se-Jeong, best known for his leading role in the tragic My Country: The New Age in 2019. He portrays Ma Gang-Wook, a prosecutor investigating a series of murders, who happens to be almost comically fearful of ghosts.
The story starts off well. The leads are lovely, the locations are beautiful, and the characters, even prosecutor Gang-Wook, live in well-appointed locations, to say the very least. However, the production stumbles as early as the second half of the first episode, and by the series midpoint it begins to lag. It’s not for want of good ingredients. The cast is top-notch; besides Baeksang award winner Park Eun-Bin, the series features veteran character actor Lee Jun-Hyeok (Love In the Moonlight, 100 Days My Prince, and too many more classics to even begin to name in this space), as well as veteran actress Ye Soo-Jung (Train to Busan). The series was filmed in Seoul, Jeju Island, and Singapore, with excellent production values, and is visually beautiful.
The writing quickly becomes rather tropey, as if all the classic tropes were required to be piled in at the same time: twee sound effects of the sort usually found in the frothiest of fusion historical romances, animated barbeque pork illustrating a character’s level of drunkenness, and even depicting the lead as sleeping in a teepee in the middle of her living room to reference her solitude. Trust me, I am as big a fan of the classic White Truck of Doom ™ device as any lover of K-dramas possibly could be, but by the time this one turned the corner, my only surprise was that all of the principal characters hadn’t seen it coming well in advance.
One doesn’t always want gripping psychological thrillers for their weekend viewing, of course, and where Spooky in Love truly delivers is in the feel-good story about justice and redemption at the heart of the tale. If you want a romance where you can genuinely root for the main characters, this is your uncomplicated solution. The horror isn’t particularly horrible, and even most of the decedents in the murder mystery arc are pretty easy on the eyes. If you’re looking for a show where the fine details support the story rather than pulling the viewer out of the action, like a completely missing heart transplant scar (maybe it was laparoscopic? Yeah, that’s the ticket), perhaps this one isn’t quite for you. Spooky in Love ticks all the boxes for a pleasant end-of-summer romance, and was in fact quite a hit, but doesn’t cover much new ground.
