The show’s premise is this: Yoon Se-ri (Son Ye-jin), a fabulously wealthy and badass South Korean businesswoman, goes paragliding and gets caught in a freak storm. She finally lands on a tree and is eventually rescued by Captain Ri Jeong-hyeok (Hyun Bin), who is...a North Korean soldier. You see, she got blown over into North Korea, which is a big no-no. And Jeong-hyeok, who is basically every romance hero you’ve ever loved rolled into one, doesn’t want her to get tortured by the State Security Department so he tries to help her sneak back over to South Korea without alerting the authorities. And...my god, guys, SO MUCH STUFF HAPPENS.
I cannot tell you any more about this show because it is a story that you need to live through in its entirety. It seemingly starts out as a wacky romantic comedy, but things quickly take a deep emotional turn. Over the course of a single episode, you could end up watching an explosive gun fight, a slapstick comedy, and a wrenching treatise on depression. And these are LONG episodes, sometimes extending past ninety minutes, and yet you will still sit there wanting more. The genius of the editing means that every episode ends on a compelling cliffhanger, so my routine became to always watch the first ten minutes of the next episode before I finally dragged myself off to bed since I absolutely had to know that Se-ri and Jeong-hyeok would be OK after their latest shenanigans. And I wasn't just invested in their romance, but also in the incredible cast of supporting characters built around them. There are so many storylines that are interwoven and delicately balanced over the course of sixteen episodes and by the end, I felt like these people had become my family. I did not want our time together to end.
Two of the actors on this show were also in Parasite and I kept remembering how I felt when I first watched that movie. I was blown away by the notion that a movie wouldn’t have to stick to a particular genre and could deftly wind its way through a complicated story that was funny, scary, incisive, and thrilling all in one go. Now that I’ve seen Crash Landing on You, however, I’m starting to understand how South Korean cinema might be primed from the existence of these K-dramas on television. The quality of this show is absolutely cinematic, and the attention to writing, costume design, cinematography, and sheer chutzpah is incredible. I do acknowledge that this is a widely popular drama, and I can’t draw generalizations from my sample size of one. But this was a hell of an introduction.
I don’t know what more I can say except that if you are a fan of epic storytelling, and an absolutely swoony romantic plot, you owe it to yourself to drop everything and watch Crash Landing on You. The actors are simply terrific, the writing is wondrously intricate and magical (seriously, the dialogue on this show can be so achingly profound), every visual aspect has been crafted with care and beauty, and most importantly, the soundtrack will burrow itself into your brain and never leave. I have no idea what the lyrics are, but I have been consistently humming the different themes from this show for weeks now and I will never stop. I have never experienced a show quite like this before, and hitherto unknown avenues of entertainment have suddenly opened up to me. It’s a slippery slope, but I’m going down that rabbit hole.
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