Sweet & Sour (새콤달콤, 2021) Review
A review of the Netflix film Sweet & Sour (새콤달콤).
This kept appearing in my recommended watches for Netflix; it was the universe trying to tell me to watch this film and it literally kept playing the trailer and scenes over and over again every time I booted up Netflix to watch the next episode of Beyond Evil.
And, once I finally hit episode 16 and finished that awesome drama (which I highly recommend, it’s a time), I was bored one day after Bengali class and was too braindead to search through everything And that, my friends, led me to Sweet and Sour.
And, to be quite frank, I found this a movie that was painful to get through and was honestly struggling with watching it. More on why later, but I just didn’t care about the characters and Krystal’s character does a random personality switch and then is head over heels with a guy that’s already got a girlfriend. For us, the viewers, it gives us a skewered POV of what’s going on.
Content
Before I get too deep into this, I must say that I don’t like romance. Which is a terrible way to start a review before discussing a romantic comedy film, and it exposes my inherent bias coming into this. But, at the same time, I think this opens up a different avenue of critical discussion when it comes to these types of films.
The movie opens with a nurse named Da-eun, played by the lovely Chae Soo-bin, caring for a guy (I honestly thought he was a kid? Still not sure) who has Hepatitis B. No one wants to visit this poor guy because of his condition, and she gives him a lot more devotion than the people around him. So, naturally, he begins to have a crush on her. But then she seems to be reciprocating, feeding him his food by hand, and they kiss.
It then pivots. The kid, whose name is Hyuk, becomes skinny and is now an engineer. His boss recommends him to work in Seoul with a larger firm, and so now he’s commuting from Incheon into Seoul every day and when he works overtime, he doesn’t even come home.
There, at the new firm (which he isn’t guaranteed a permanent position at), he meets Bo-young, played by Krystal, who is hellbent on getting this position permanently and destroying Hyuk’s path. Da-eun character, from what we can gather, is also working too much overtime for more money and is equally stressed at her job.
The dominoes begin to fall here as Hyuk is depicted as cheating on Da-eun character, and their relationship begins to fall apart with either of them necessarily wanting it to.
The rest of the movie is about the consequences of all of this, but, to be quite frank, I found myself wondering what the point of this movie actually was. I genuinely understand what it was attempting to convey, but it very much missed the mark for me.
There’s some plot twists present in the narrative, but, honestly, I found them to be poorly executed and actually quite clunky. Because we largely only follow Hyuk’s character at work, we lose what makes Da-eun so special to him and why he loves her so much. It becomes so fragmented since we as viewers aren’t invested in their relationship, and so we lose track of why this is so important. Then it lessens the emotional impact of what’s going on and makes it almost like a chore to keep watching.
Overall Thoughts
It has a good cast, but the movie itself is actually very disappointing. It lacks substance and emotion to it, and thus we, as viewers, feel like we’re missing something major as we watch the painfulness of a dying relationship and breakup unfold before our eyes.
I think that maybe if we hashed out some moments where the main couple was actually together, showing their happy moments, incorporating flashbacks so we see their history, then it might make more sense to have this kind of narrative. But otherwise it currently comes across as just a bland film with the acting best during the comedic bits.
