Review of Miss Granny / 수상한 그녀, directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk

Throughout the years, I had heard of Miss Granny, but had never actually bothered to watch it. The summer of 2023 was a pretty relaxing one for me after my first year of graduate school, but there were plenty of days I had nothing to do outside of my freelance and writing work.

So I ended up going on Netflix and seeing what kind of movies were available many days, branching out and watching a ton of movies and television shows I probably would have never watched otherwise. And that was how I landed on watching Miss Granny after scrolling on Netflix for a bit.

It was a true blast from the past, that’s for sure. I had no idea that this was released in 2014 until I was writing this blog post, but I was a fan of B1A4 because that was one of the very first groups I had ended up listening to in my time as a young K-pop fan. Anyways, enough about that—onwards with the review.

A grandmother suddenly finds herself in her twenty-year-old body.

At the beginning of Miss Granny, the family dynamic is established immediately. The grandmother is the father’s mother, his wife doesn’t really like her, and she has two grandkids.

One of them, Ji-ha, says he goes off to play music but what his family doesn’t know is that he is in an emo punk bad that’s not very good. When the mother of the family falls ill and they blame the grandmother for it, she decides that she is probably going to die soon after overhearing the family wants to put in her a nursing home.

After making dinner plans with her grandson, she stumbles across a photo studio. Deciding this will be her last picture before she dies, she sits down for a portrait, but when she leaves and gets on the bus, she realizes she has magically transformed back into the body of her twenty year old self.

She cannot return home like this, so at first she sits at a spa for awhile and realizes how good it feels to be young again. Then she heads to the home of one of her friends, Mr. Park, where she uses her knowledge to secure a room with him and his daughter.

After that, it’s all about going out and enjoying life again, even though she keeps going to events that are geared for old people. Those on the streets see her as strange because she speaks informally despite looking younger than them, and her attitude is more like an elderly woman’s and not a college student.

There’s something she does as well in this process: she befriends her grandson, realizes what kind of band she’s in, and is recruited to be their lead singer. At the same time, a music producer at one of the big Korean music shows that idols perform on hustles after her, trying to recruit her for his own purposes.

The band grows successful, and they get on the music show. Mr. Park realizes the extent of who his new mysterious tenant is, and when she bleeds at a water park, they realize the more she bleeds she will revert back to her original body. She is then kicked out of the accommodations by Mr. Park’s daughter, who thinks her father is having a sexual relationship with her and is being taken advantage of.

The grandmother befriends Ji-ha while being in the band, coming into the family home and taking her bank card so she has money. The night the band is supposed to perform at a big concert, Ji-ha gets into a serious accident, and the grandmother decides she is going to donate her blood in order to save her grandson.

This leads to her going back into her real body, and, in a small epilogue, the band is shown to be performing with Ji-ha’s sister as the new singer afterwards. Mr. Park finds the studio, and in a hilarious cameo, his younger self is Kim Soo-hyun.

Overall Thoughts

I thought this was a funny movie. There’s a lot of relevant messages and themes packed into its storyline, which I thought was pretty great to watch considering a lot of us have this nostalgia for going back to the days when our bodies are young and mobile.

This isn’t a movie that’s like pure cinema, but it’s definitely something that comes across as entertainment with meaningful messages. I’m glad I watched this at the end of the day.

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