Review of Love Untangled / 고백의 역사, directed by Namkoong Sun

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.

I tend to write about everything under the sun that I come across. Sometimes I don’t write blog posts about the content and entertainment I consume simply because I don’t feel like it, but I find that writing reviews and reflecting on movies, books, and television allows me to remember it more—and it serves as a bit of an archive for when I start to forget about it.

A theme of 2025 for me has been trying to diversify the kinds of movies, books, and television I’m coming across. I think I have been successful in that in some ways, but in others I’ve been really going back to what I’m comfortable with. I’ve always been mainly thrust into East Asian cinema, with an emphasis on Korean, so putting on a Korean movie for me is kind of a way to relax and go into something I’m familiar with.

That said, this blog post is about a Korean movie. It’s going to release much later than when the movie came out on Netflix because of my editorial calendar, but I did watch this movie originally within two days of release. I just have an incredible amount of backlog when it comes to blog posts, as I got a new job and was trying to write as much as I could before I started the job.

I knew about this film before it came out, but I wasn’t interested at first. I think this was one of those movies that was vibes for me, as I saw it was available at the time and decided to watch it because it seemed like something I just wanted to see in that moment. Anyway: it was a quick watch overall.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to keep going on and on in the introduction.

A high school girl finds her footing in 1999, whether it comes to her personal matters or her love life.

The main character in this movie is Park Se-ri, who, at the start of the movie, is a high schooler in the year 1999. She has a been of a complex because of her naturally curly hair, which is gorgeous, but in her world and society she sees it as a nuisance rather than something to celebrate. She wants to get rid of it by straightening it, which might help her goal of attraching the popular boy Kim Hyun’s attention.

Things are about to change for her when she saves the transfer student Han Yoon-seok when he almost drowns at the beach. His mother opened the new Seoul-inspired salon in town, and when Se-ri realizes that he was her son, she wants to befriend him even more. While she doesn’t have the best of intentions at first, she does grow to love him as a friend and brings him into her friend group.

He’s shy and introverted, and when she learns about his father and the pressure he put on his son, she helps Yoon-seok try to become more of who he was meant to be—rather than retreating inside of his shell. He doesn’t want to take the national exam to go to college, which further disappoints his father and leads to some of his inner turmoil going on right now.

When their friends finally help Se-ri confess to Hyun, during a school trip, Se-ri decides this isn’t what she wants anymore when she’s facing him. She confesses that she has grown to love someone else in the time before this, which implies heavily that Yoon-seok is the object of her affection right now.

And it’s true: she’s smitten for Yoon-seok. The two end up dating for a bit, but when his mother goes back to Seoul for a bit in order to “buy materials for the shop,” Yoon-seok has to go to Seoul when he gets a call that his mother is in the hospital. Turns out his father beat his mother, leading to more potential friction in their relationship.

Se-ri actually ends up going to Seoul, too, but when she hears that Yoon-seok tells his mother that his aunt wants them to come to the United States and leave behind his abusive father. Se-ri doesn’t want to be the one to stop them from living good lives, so when she gets the chance, she leaves him a voicemail saying that she doesn’t want to keep going in their romance.

Some time passes, and Se-ri graduates from high school. She decides to study marine sports when she’s in college and one day her friends clue her in on a blind date they want to go her on. Se-ri doesn’t feel up to it and decides not to go, but when her date calls her, it’s actually Yoon-seok.

She tells him she’s sorry for what she said in the voicemail, but then he reveals he heard her other voicemail that she thought she’d deleted in the moment. In it she had revealed she didn’t want to actually break up with him and whatnot, and once he tells her this, they decide to get back together again.

Overall Thoughts

I think this was such a cute movie, and I think I was expecting something sad to happen in certain moments (because, you know, this is a Korean movie and kind of comes across like a Korean drama), but it never really did. I did want to know more about the domestic abuse subplot because I think that’s such valuable representation—I rarely see that openly discussed in Korean entertainment.

Did I love this movie though? Not really. It was cute and fun to watch in the moment, which is what I needed at the time, but I feel like it wasn’t too memorable as a movie. It felt quite generic in some ways. Nowadays I want to see more movies that I want to remember for a long time (even without the blog posts to jog my memories), and while the actors did a solid job in this one, I wanted more from it.

I think if this movie interests you though then you should definitely give it a chance! I can see how other people who are less picky might find themselves loving this movie. Taste is so incredibly subjective, and what I might not like or care for could be someone else’s favorite movie. Neither of us are wrong!

So go see it if you want to and have the chance. I think it might be worth it.