Inside Love

The Beauty Inside, a Korean movie I liked very much, was done again as a k-drama television series available on Netflix now. Out of curiosity I watched it, and it's a bit different from the film.

An actress who is notorious for running away from situations for mysterious reasons, Han Se-gye (Seo Hyun-jin) has a huge problem. One week out of the month she changes into a different person of any age, race or gender, and must live that way for a week. This change happens with only a few seconds of warning when she senses it coming over her. Also, just to keep things interesting, occasionally she changes off-schedule. During one of these abrupt shifts she crosses paths with Seo Do-jae (Lee Min-ki), a chaebol executive director of an airline company, who suffers from his own peculiar problem: face blindness due to a brain injury after a traffic accident.

I have to say, romantically pairing an actress whose face constantly changes with a rich guy who can't see faces is pretty brilliant. You'd think they wouldn't have any problems, but oh, boy. Conflict abounds. Just when you think everything will be okay, there's a past connection these two share that they aren't initially aware of that comes into play that will have you seething with frustration. I certainly did.

This series is very romantic, highly visual, and also has a number of very convenient coincidences between the leads as well as the secondary characters, the chaebol's stepsister and the actress's friend/gopher (who also have a pretty sizeable conflict to wrestle.) I'm now used to the nonstop fate and oops-we-were-meant-for-each-other that Koreans love so much, so I didn't mind. All the actors did a marvelous job, including the half-dozen who played Han Se-gye, but Lee Min-ki pulled out all the stops playing his role, and he was truly wonderful. Highly recommend this one.