Dear Hongrang / kdrama review.
Dear Hongrang / kdrama review.
This is a review of the kdrama Dear Hongrang with little to no spoilers.
There’s a lot to like about Dear Hongrang, if you’re into costume dramas. It features stunning cinematography and well-designed fight scenes, a mysterious puzzle, complex characters, and a plot that takes us away from the typical court battles that plague most Korean costume dramas. Instead, we get to see a highly dramatic and gloomy portrayal of a wealthy merchant family with numerous secrets.
The drama manages to deliver a lot despite being very dense and having limited time to tell the story, with only eleven episodes when most costume dramas would take at least sixteen. And although the story doesn’t always flow together seamlessly, it gives us plenty of character moments, opportunities for reflection, and space to sit in the silence that lurks between the intense swordfights and the melodrama of the narrative.
There is a heightened soapy drama at play here with some interesting clichés and tropes, but the story still maintains to ground itself with its rawness, the acting, and the beautiful cinematography that just makes the world it’s set in richer. The narrative successfully amplifies the viewer’s emotions, as well as the ambition and intensity of the characters. The story manages to keep you in fascinated suspense most of the time, even though the episodes perhaps rely a bit too much on flashbacks and sometimes lacked balance between the side-plots.
I must say that I found the story sometimes too melancholic, and the gloomy atmosphere it created tiring to watch, even though the plot and characters kept me captivated. I took the occasional breaks in the middle of an episode and returned to it when I was ready. The story is heavy, as if it’s pressing down on us just like the characters’ past does.
And yet Dear Hongrang never seemed to try to be brutal just for the sake of being brutal. It seemed as if every terrible death we were shown was there to move the story forward or shed light on the cruelty in this melancholic, difficult, and harsh world that these characters find themselves in.
The love story between the main characters wasn’t for me, even though I enjoyed the chemistry, the tropyness as well as the longing glances. But I found it came on rather too suddenly, and I felt the episodes actually had enough to do with the mystery and family drama.
Dear Hongrang was a gloomy, demanding, and highly dramatic watch with a fascinating mystery and a heavy tone that is certainly not for everyone. But the pain of the narrative and the longing that the story carries and the sorrow of the characters stays with you for some time.
