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Hmmmm

You Are My Spring is one of those k-dramas that charmed yet puzzled me. Part of its undeniable attraction as a romance was diminished by what I perceived as dueling conflicts (love and murder rarely mix well.) The confusion that they created with presenting the crimes of the past that affected all of the main characters while mapping out the romance between the hero and heroine was disappointing and distracting.

The basic story concerns four people whose lives are intertwined from the tragedies in their childhood: Kang Da-jeong (Seo Hyun-jin), a hotel concierge who moves to a rooftop apartment in the opening, and meets Joo Young-do (Kim Dong-wook) a psychiatrist whose clinic occupies the floor below her place. Both of them seem like people who want to help others, and yet they clash almost from the very beginning. Chae Joon (Yoon Park), a stalkerish man pursuing Da-jeong, seems to be a former patient of Young-do's as well as a psycopath, so I pegged him as the antagonist until he abruptly leaves the story. Them his identical twin from the U.S., Dr. Ian Chase (also played by Yoon Park) shows up and acts even more menacing.

The romance between Da-jeong and Young-do is of the slow-burn variety, very tearful at times, and yet well plotted. The almost inevitable you-are-my-destiny storyline wasn't as blunt or obvious as most are in k-dramas, so I liked that. What keeps interfering with it is the crime puzzle that involves both Chae Joon and Ian Chase, which is all over the place and very hard to follow. Most of the past is presented in disjointed flashbacks that are often not fully defined, which is one problem with the series. The other is having the antagonist played by identical twins; even after watching the whole series I'm still not really sure if one or both were the bad guy.

Both Da-jeong and Young-do have plenty of friends and relations with problems of their own, and they weave fairly deftly in and out of the story line. My favorite secondary character, Ahn Ga-yeong (played brilliantly by Nam Gyu-ri) portrays her role as Young-do's selfish neurotic ex-wife with absolute aplomb; she stole every scene she appeared in and turned out to be utterly adorable in the end. While I'm not a fan of psychological thrillers, I thought the mental health aspect of the series was well-done, too. If you could remove the crime puzzle from this series it would have been a major improvement, I think.

The series may be triggering for abuse victims as there are some scenes of child and wife battering, so I also want to mention that. Available on Netflix.

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