Review of Even If This Love Disappears From the World Tonight / 오늘 밤, 세계에서 이 사랑이 사라진다 해도, directed by Kim Hye-young

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

A lot of my introductions lately are reminiscing on my habit of doom scrolling instead of actively and mindfully consuming content. After working for myself for a few years and being in graduate school, I had a routine where I was watching a movie every night or reading for pleasure or class. It was something that I really took for granted, as I started an 8-5 job and have very limited time in general nowadays.

My blog posts are going to fall off of a cliff at some point, but I’ve come to terms with that fact. I simply haven’t been watching as many movies or reading as much as I used to because I’ve been coming home, eating dinner, finishing what I need to do in my personal and professional lives, then turning to Instagram and YouTube to fill the void of my free time.

I did start getting a little depressed falling into this rut though, which is why I’m trying to be more intentional with my time and watch more shows and movies, read more books, that force me to use my brain in the same way I was doing throughout graduate school. Going into a corporate role has also made me feel a lot more stupid than I used to be, especially as I’m not engaging in critical thinking as much.

All of this is to say: I’m trying to keep up more with the recent releases when I have time. I’ve been waiting for Even If This Love Disappears From the World Tonight to come out on Netflix ever since I became aware of it, and when it did come out, at the time of typing this, I watched it the first weekend is was available to stream.

Let’s get into the review then, shall we? I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know that introductions can get quite long.

A shy high schooler falls in love with a female classmate who forgets the day’s events every night.

Our main character in this movie, and our male lead, is Kim Jae-won. He’s a high schooler (although I can and will make the argument that Choo Young-woo, the actor plays Jae-won, definitely looks like he’s in the middle of college) who is pretty shy and just kind of exists in the world of his school. His mother passed away and it’s just him and his father, who has a couple of scenes here and there with his son.

Those scenes are kind of meta and serve as character building, but I wanted more from that storyline in general. Regardless, we learn later on in the movie that there’s more to Jae-won’s story than he lets on, especially when it comes to his health. But in the world of his school, one day he gains the confidence to walk up to a female student: Han Seo-yun.

At first she’s put off by the fact he just kind of walks up to her and asks her out, but she agrees to it anyways, much to everyone else’s shock. The two continue going on dates even after this one, building up a fairly innocent romance, but we learn early on that Seo-yun actually has a condition. That’s disclosed fairly early on in this show.

So basically the premise here is that she has a brain condition that forces her to forget the previous day around the same time every night. Jae-won has no idea that this happens to her, so he kind of brushes off the entire notion of acting like strangers at school, but he does learn about it around the halfway point of the movie. That’s a dramatic scene in itself as Seo-yun literally is kissing him on a bus and forgets where she’s at and who he is.

She does take notes about the day that she can access, which helps her. Her best friend also helps out in a protective way, but then helps bring them together later on in the movie. Like the father and Jae-won’s friend, who he helps out from getting bullied at school, these characters don’t really exist outside of the stratosphere of the main characters’ worlds, so we don’t really get to learn much about them throughout the course of the movie.

Spoilers ahead in this section, but I do feel like the pacing was really off in the second part of the movie. The reveal that Jae-won has a heart condition felt kind of random, especially since the movie does end up killing him off. I was not familiar with the original version of this movie going into it, so I didn’t know where this was going, but it felt so randomly placed and not productive in the themes and long-term storyline of this film.

Overall Thoughts

While this was a beautiful movie to watch, it simply felt kind of empty to me. I wanted more from it in the sense that it wasn’t checking off tropes (e.g. girl with memory problems, boy with a heart issue), and if it did follow tropes, it owned it and made it more unique than predecessors in the same vein. This movie feels like it fails at that, and the actors do also feel like they’re simply going through the motions in terms of the two leads.

I did find it well filmed in terms of cinematography and actual blocking/setting. I enjoyed watching it from a visual sense and thought that it was coherent. It was just that the story itself and dialogue had some issues it simply did not overcome throughout its run time, which made this more disappointing to me.

I think if you’re interested in the movie give it a chance, or if you have a free Friday night and want something that could make you cry then watch it. I personally was not the biggest fan, and I think that this was an average movie for my taste—but someone else out there might love it more than I did!

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