Our fantasy rom-com premieres to a decent start with spells, haunted houses, and fake grim reapers. Our cursed leading man is finally on the verge of liberation, but is it really a K-drama if everything goes smoothly between him and his leading lady — the only one who can break his curse? Let’s find out.
EPISODES 1-2
We open on a rainy day in a deserted shaman shrine that doubles as a crime scene. Amidst tools of the shamanic trade and pools of water on the floor, a lady in a raincoat lays flat on her back. A side door creaks open to let out a man dressed in a black suit, and he looms over her. As she gazes at him, she notes the accuracy of dramas in their depiction of grim reapers as “handsome.” Lol. Typical of dying single women in dramaland, she wonders if she’s going to die like that without getting to date someone. And if that’s the case, she better make a date out of drinking tea with the handsome grim reaper. Heh.
Our raincoat lady is none other than our heroine, LEE HONG-JO (Jo Boa), a ninth-grade civil servant whose diligence at work is a contrast to the unbothered attitude of her colleagues. And no, she’s not dying. The creepy shrine business is just another regular day in the life of a hardworking civil servant in Onju city.
For more of the creeps, we’re introduced to the handsome not-a-grim-reaper, who is, in actual fact, our male lead, JANG SHIN-YU (Kim Ro-woon). As a hotshot lawyer in a fancy law firm, Shin-yu is no stranger to attracting attention from the ladies — including a really shy missus who only reveals her bloody hand to him. Red Hand, as she’s fondly and aptly named, is, well, an invisible-to-everyone-else-but-him hand that pops out every now and then in the dark to caress his neck and cheeks. K-dramas! They’ll string us along for weeks without skinship between an OTP, but here we are interlocking fingers with a creepy hand in the first episode. Nice!
Shin-yu’s involuntary romance with Red Hand isn’t the only creepy thing in store for us, and soon, a blood moon occurs. What’s the best thing to do during a blood moon? Why, visit a haunted house, of course! That’s exactly what a vlogger does on a live stream, and his haunted house of choice is the deserted shrine we saw earlier. Unfortunately, one fright leads to another, and in his haste to leave, he trips and lands on a cutter blade in the yard. Yikes! Wait, what’s the genre of this drama again? Slasher horror?
Speaking of horror, Hong-jo gets transferred to the Park Maintenance Team at City Hall where her nemesis in the person of GONG SEO-GOO (Hyun Bong-shik) is waiting for her. When she was still a rookie, Hong-jo erroneously reported Mr. Gong to the audit team after she saw him accept what she didn’t know then was condolence money for his mom’s funeral. Since then, Mr. Gong has had it out for her, and the rest of the team are firmly on his side.
After the vlogger’s death, the citizens petition City Hall to demolish the haunted shrine, but the responsibility is passed around. When the case lands in their department, Hong-jo volunteers to handle it, and Mr. Gong is only too happy to throw her under the bus onto the case.
Hong-jo and her raincoat visit the shrine for inspection, and when she faces a statue in the shrine, she hears a whisper, “What took you so long?” Erm… the rain? She dismisses the whisper as something from her imagination and continues her tour until she spots a shadowy figure in one of the rooms. Frightened, she falls to the floor, and we get a replay of the opening scene with Hong-jo’s grim reaper monologue, and her asking Shin-yu the reaper out for some tea. Heh.
What business does Shin-yu have in the haunted shrine? I’m glad you asked. Apparently, the land belongs to his family, and he was entrusted with the task of taking care of the shrine. Unfortunately, the caretaker he hired did a terrible job of managing the place and now the Poongsan Jang family has a death on the property. Shin-yu’s father, JANG SE-HEON (Lee Pil-mo), is not impressed with the outcome of things, and he tells his son to quit the law firm if he doesn’t have time to take care of the oh-so-very-important-to-our-family shrine.
But the shrine is the least of Shin-yu’s concerns at the moment due to a recent development of tremors in his right hand. He is diagnosed with a chromosome mutation that could lead to right hemiplegia, loss of sense in his hands and feet, and language impairment. And as for treatment options, well, you can’t treat a genetic disorder. Basically, Shin-yu’s got a time bomb in his head that could explode anytime, and he’s advised to be careful of stressful situations.
But stress comes around in the person of Hong-jo (in her quest to demolish the shrine), and she recognizes Shin-yu as the grim reaper she met. Shin-yu would rather restore the shrine than demolish it, and he orders Hong-jo to leave his office unless she wants to go to a tea house with a grim reaper. (But she already did! Duh!)
Hong-jo insists on a demolition because the shrine’s shaman is in a nursing home and there’s no point keeping up the building. And to Shin-yu’s question about why she’s going this far, Hong-jo replies that she is lonely. She wants to properly resolve the shrine issue so that Mr. Gong and the rest of the team will have lunch with her because she doesn’t want to eat alone at home and at work too. Awwww. Shin-yu ends up agreeing to demolish the shrine on the condition that the shaman permits it. He is so sure that she will turn Hong-jo down, but to his surprise, shaman EUN-WOL (Kim Hye-ok) consents to the demolition as well.
Shaman Eun-wol’s reason for siding with Hong-jo is simple: all the pain and curses accompanying Shin-yu’s karma for killing Red Hand (it is implied that he killed her, maybe in a previous life?) will be over soon because the owner of a certain wooden box has shown up. “Who is the owner?” Shin-yu asks, and the shaman replies that it’s the woman he’s thinking of. Hmmm. Shin-yu has another woman on his mind? Red Hand is gonna be so jealous. Lol.
It would seem that the woman in Shin-yu’s thoughts resides only in his thoughts, because the rest of the Park Maintenance Team don’t care, and they go out for dinner to celebrate the demolition without the team member that made it happen. Hong-jo crouches in a corner to cry in disappointment — but not for long, because Shin-yu shows up with the gift of a wooden box that supposedly belonged to her.
Hong-jo is suspicious of the “black mini coffin,” but since the gift is coming from the nice shaman who comforted her in her loneliness, she doesn’t think it’ll be anything weird. Hong-jo even gets a little excited at the thought that the box might contain an antique painting, and Shin-yu is also curious about the contents. But try as she might, Hong-jo cannot open the box. “People won’t open up to me. Even this lock won’t open up to me,” she complains in drunken frustration. But since she knows how painful it is to be abandoned, Hong-jo decides not to throw away the box regardless.
If there’s one person Hong-jo would like to open up to her, it’s KWON JAE-KYUNG (Ha Joon), a policy advisor at City Hall. Hong-jo has a massive crush on Jae-kyung, but she’s sandwiched between over a hundred other ladies who are vying for the attention of City Hall’s perfect visual. You know that Hong-jo has got it real bad when she imagines Jae-kyung (in matching colors!) coming to her aid following an injury she sustains at home. “Please, can you come?” Hong-jo whispers into the void for someone, anyone, to come. And that’s when she hears the lock on the box unlatch.
Meanwhile, Jae-kyung scouts Shin-yu as a lawyer for City Hall, but a lower paycheck aside, Shin-yu is not interested in counseling civil servants and assisting them with lawsuits. However, Jae-kyung gets his attention when he mentions that Shin-yu will get the opportunity to deal with big firms — yunno, those shady ones that do illegal things. And among the big firms, the one that seals the deal is Haum construction.
Haum construction is led by the arrogant LEE HYUN-SEO (Kim Kwon), who’s the biggest client and a shareholder at Shin-yu’s law firm. Shin-yu is ticked off when their boss (cameo by Yoon Kye-sang!) decides to cover up Hyun-seo’s sexual and verbal assault on two of their lawyers, and he eventually quits following Hyun-seo’s expectation for the lawyers to grovel at his feet because he bought them apology gifts. Pfft.
Shin-yu resumes at City Hall and he’s quick to pick up on Hong-jo’s crush on Jae-kyung. But he’s more interested in knowing if she has unlocked the box, and if yes, what it contains. The most important content of the box is a book: Spells of the Heavens. It was penned by a famous ancient shaman, and in it, the shaman writes that only she and the person she chooses (Hong-jo?) can cast the spells in the book. Shin-yu tells Hong-jo that she can have all the other spells because he needs just one spell. He holds off on telling her the spell he needs, but I have no doubt it’ll be something related to breaking the curse of Red Hand.
Joining the City Hall train — well, as a visitor to her mayor dad and as Shin-yu’s fiancée-in-waiting — is YOON NA-YEON (Yura). Na-yeon and Hong-jo just so happened to have had a falling out in high school after Hong-jo “stole” the boy Na-yeon liked. But Na-yeon appears to be an unreliable narrator, and from Hong-jo’s reaction when they meet again in City Hall, there’s more to that story. Hong-jo doesn’t accept Na-yeon’s half-assed apology, and Shin-yu — who should have stayed out of it because it’s none of his damn business — tells Hong-jo that this is why she eats alone. Wow! Look who’s graduated from lawyer to judge.
You’d think that since Shin-yu needs Hong-jo to cast a spell for him, he’ll at least wait to hear from both sides, but no. Man’s firmly on Na-yeon’s side, and he goes further to berate Hong-jo for being the type of person to get excited about the smallest gestures of kindness after overhearing her confess to Jae-kyung (who politely but firmly turns her down). How rude!
Things get to a head when the news spreads around City Hall that Hong-jo confessed to Jae-kyung and got rejected, and Hong-jo becomes the topic of office gossip. Like work isn’t lonely enough. Sigh. What’s a girl in possession of a spell book to do when she has reached the end of her rope? Why, cast a love spell on her crush, of course. While Hong-jo is in the middle of her ritual, Shin-yu is in the middle of the road having a crisis at the steering wheel. And yep, it’s Red Hand, again, and this time, she leads him to crash his car by the side of the road. Welp!
While the story demands that I be intrigued by the curse of Red Hand and how Hong-jo fits into all of this, what really drew me in is Hong-jo herself. It was so easy to sympathize with the lonely civil servant who maintains a cheerful disposition despite the world shutting her out over and over again. On the contrary, I can’t really say the same about Shin-yu. Yes, I know he’s going through stuff, but really, who isn’t? No one says to be overly sympathetic, but the least he could have done was be kind and not throw the vulnerable moment Hong-jo shared with him back in her face. He really struck a nerve with his remark about her eating alone, and I hope she makes him sweat before breaking his curse.
Speaking of which, I am so not looking forward to diving into Shin-yu’s past and the origin of the Red Hand curse because I’ve been burned by a certain recent drama about past lives and shamans. Unfortunately, the past life story is inevitable here, so here’s to crossing my fingers and proceeding with caution.