Review of At Eighteen / 열여덟의 순간 (2019)

I don’t know what compelled me to press play on this drama. I’d heard of At Eighteen and had no interest in trying to watch it, but one day when I had finished Doctor Cha I randomly pressed play on this drama.

I knew absolutely nothing about it, and I didn’t even know that Ong Seung-woo was an actor—or was trying to be one. I wasn’t that impressed with his performance in this drama, but I’d imagine (or hope) he has gotten better over the years.

But I ended up watching this drama all the way through, even though my heart went into my throat when Moonbin popped up on the screen.

I was not prepared for that at all and it honestly broke my heart in the beginning. I had to stop watching because it was hard, but I still got through it since it felt like a disservice.

Onwards with the review!

Choi Jin-woo transfers schools and finds himself in similar, but also different, situations.

Ong Seung-woo is Choi Jin-woo in this drama, who has transferred from his school because of a bullying situation. His friend and he were being targeted by bullies, and he was the one who was forced to transfer after a specific incident happens.

His friend remains behind, and that’s going to be a big problem later on in the show.

But when Jin-woo arrives at his new school and takes up a new job at a convenience store, he gets sucked into the world of a fellow rich student, Hwi-young. I screamed when I saw Shin Seung-ho—I had no idea this was his very first role in a drama.

Hwi-young steals an expensive watch from his hagwon teacher and sets Jin-woo up. Another student, the genius Sang-hoon, is a witness to this and will leverage what he saw against Hwi-young for the rest of the drama.

Jin-woo is investigated by the police and the school, and is preparing to transfer yet again. When all the charges are dropped against him and the situation seems to be different that expected from the adults’ perspective, it puts him on Hwi-young’s bad list.

The subplot with Hwi-young is he is a perfectionist and ends up in a wealthy family that’s mildly sadistic.

His father isn’t the best father, his mother is willing to bribe people so Hwi-young succeeds, but his mental health goes down the toilet because of it and he bullies others.

He pays off a group of bullies—the same ones Jin-woo and his friend were dealing with—to beat up Jin-woo’s friend, but then he dies because of his injuries. That puts Jin-woo in an even worse mood, and a member of Hwi-young’s clique ends up creating friction because of this.

Jin-woo also has a major crush on his classmate Soo-bin, who has an overbearing perfectionistic mother who disapproves of the relationship from the beginning.

The drama from this point on is really slow to me, and I struggled to get through it because of this. Students are fighting over who dates who, Soo-bin ends up tutoring Jin-woo to get his grades up, Hwi-young starts having a mental breakdown.

Moonbin’s character is involved in a subplot where he’s pseudo dating a girl, but turns out he’s actually gay for Hwi-young.

Eventually, Sang-hoon’s father sells out Hwi-young and he gets in trouble for everything he’s done. Early in the drama Hwi-young’s mother buys out the teacher who teaches math because Hwi-young got a question wrong, which made certain people, including Sang-hoon, rank lower.

That put him in a bad mood where he screws with Hwi-young over the drama, and although he didn’t intentionally mean to get the kid in trouble, he’s the catalyst to that issue.

Overall Thoughts

I found this drama to be cute at times, but tedious to get through because of how slow the plot was. It felt like the same exact issues kept coming up over and over again, and then certain things got brushed to the side.

Like Hwi-young and his friend were accessories to murder. They literally paid some bullies off to murder Jin-woo’s best friend.

That’s so messed up on so many levels, even if it wasn’t intended he died in the end.

Lots of memories contained within this single year for Jin-woo, but the acting was also so wooden from Ong Seung-woo that I couldn’t understand him fully as a character and his depth. Shin had the best acting out of the group, that’s for sure.

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