In the new Netflix Korean rom-com Our Sticky Love, a prosecutor with amnesia falls for the man who claims to be her boyfriend, a boxer-turned-gangster protecting her from being killed by his boss. Yes, it’s a sticky situation, which is why the show has the title it has.
Opening Shot: A woman lies in a pool of her own blood. She’s been tied up and beaten. A voice says, “If everyone’s life had a genre, what would yours be?” A man kneels by her side, turns her towards him, and recognizes her.
The Gist: Later we flash to the woman (Ha Young), with a doctor telling her she has amnesia. But because she was found with no identification or a phone, and her fingerprints have been damaged, there was no way to identify her. Of course, the woman is distraught, and when she looks in the mirror, she has an instinct that she lived the life of someone with high status and good taste; she even sinches up her gown to show her abs.
Weeks later, her hospital roommates tell her that someone has come to visit her, and he’s handsome. She’s excited to see him, but the man who comes in, Jang Tae-ha (Jung Hae-in), is scruffy and wearing a sweat suit from the boxing gym he runs. He claims her name is Go Eun-sae and he is her boyfriend, they’ve been dating for two years, and that she works in his grandmother’s taffy store in the village where they both live. The woman has her doubts, and when she’s released into his care — the alternative is government housing — she doesn’t believe the story of how they met, or thinks she’d ever live in the house where they supposedly cohabitate.
In flashback, we see the real story: The woman is Go Ji-won, a prosecutor who works anti-corruption cases for Seoul’s prosecution office. She’s so rich that she drives to work in a Lambo, and she’s on the hunt to get evidence that the mayor is giving contracts to Mirae Eden, a company whose chairman, Baek Sang-gil (Heo Sung-tae), started the company as criminal gang, and continues to use the legitimate corporation to hide his criminal activity.
He catches Ji-won trying to get surveillance of a payout between him and the mayor, which is how she ended up beaten to a pulp. Tae-ha, one of his most loyal soldiers, is called on to eliminate her, but when he gets a good look at her, he realizes he needs to save her.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We’ve seen a fair number of amnesia plots lately, from the third season of Silo to the recent MMA-centric drama Wrath. Neither of these shows, though, are rom-coms like Our Sticky Love.
Our Take: We were definitely happy that the writer of Our Sticky Love, Mo Ji-hye, saw fit to take the second half of the first episode to explain how Ji-won/Eun-sae (we’ll refer to her by the latter name from here on out) got into the situation she was in, and why Tae-ha is protecting her. It was pretty obvious that the cover story he concocted for the two of them had a lot of holes in it, and despite her amnesia, Eun-sae’s prosecutorial mind was going to see through it pretty quickly. What we didn’t want was to spend multiple episodes trying to figure out who they both really were, so we were happy to see the flashback.
But what we also know is that this a rom-com, not a crime drama. So a lot of the story is going to be about Eun-sae and Tae-ha falling for each other as they hide out in this village, where he’s a boxing coach and she’s a taffy puller. Sure, Eun-sae’s memory will start coming back to her, but before that happens, it’s pretty obvious that the two of them are going to do all the requisite rom-com things that will make her returning memories conflict with her feelings for Tae-ha.
The first episode’s tonal shift from the silliness of Eun-sae insisting that she’s not Tae-ha’s girlfriend to the more noirish crime drama aspect of how Eun-sae got into this situation was a bit odd. There essentially was no comedy for most of the final 25 minutes of the episode, and you could be mistaken thinking that the show was going to go in the direction of something like Agent Kim Reactivated. Baek Sang-gil is a pretty serious and ruthless gangster, so it’ll be interesting to watch him pursue both Tae-ha and Eun-sae, once he gets wind that the prosecutor who’s after him isn’t dead.
Performance Worth Watching: Ha Young has good comedic timing as Go Eun-sae objects to every aspect of the life Tae-ha has brought her into.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Eun-sae tests her chemistry with Tae-ha by kissing him.
Sleeper Star: Heo Sung-tae is appropriately gnarly as Baek Sang-gil, who turned a criminal street gang into a conglomerate, with the help of Tae-ha.
Most Pilot-y Line: When the doctor tells Eun-sae that she has amnesia, he says, “It’s the same amnesia you often see in movies.” That’s quite the diagnosis, doc.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Our Sticky Love feels like it’ll be a fun romcom that can slip into being a noirish crime drama at times, which is certainly different from a lot of romantic K-comedies we’ve seen of late.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.