Tale of the Nine Tailed (2020)
Review of Tale of the Nine Tailed / 구미호뎐 (2020)
I watched Tale of the Nine Tailed during a major Lee Dong-wook kick, and, I will say, this drama made me even have an even larger appetite for Lee Dong-wook.
This is a preliminary statement before we get into the actual review of the drama, but his hair alone made me stan him in this show. It’s a perfect fox red and looks absolutely immaculate. I’m in love with his hair and can’t watch the rest of his dramas now because his hair is so perfect.
Besides the beauty that is LDW’s hair, this plot and narrative seemed right up my alley from the beginning. Our main character is a human news reporter who specializes in the paranormal around Seoul, except she doesn’t actually know about the supernatural.
But then she meets Lee Yeon, a former mountain spirit turned immigration agent for the afterlife. He is an immortal gumiho looking for his lost love. This is literally the dream of so many girls who wrote fanfiction right here.
With that being said, let’s dive straight into this review.
Content
This is your typical romantic Korean drama, except now the twist is that our male lead is a gumiho, or, if have to translate it into English, a nine-tailed fox.
This means we get some corny CGI throughout this drama, but I’m not mad at it. They really owned the fact that this is the supernatural and we see so many different creatures from Korean folklore, whether they are good or bad. That’s one thing I really liked about this Korean drama, since I felt like I learned something about it during the process of watching it.
Anyways, as mentioned before, our female lead is human. Her parents mysteriously disappeared when she was a child, and ever since then she’s been tirelessly searching for answers on what happened that night. But she was spared that night by Lee Yeon, who killed the gumihos who replaced her parents and tried to kill her.
He commands her to forget, but she doesn’t. Later, as an adult, that’s how he begins to be suspicious of her. He thinks that she might be his reincarnated love, because she looks exactly like her. But there’s a catch: his original love was possessed by the Imugi, who wanted revenge against Lee Yeon.
The beginning of this drama had awesome pacing. I was completely absorbed into this world, spooked as our female lead, Ji-ah, becomes entrenched in this new world of the supernatural and Lee Yeon’s confusion at who exactly Ji-ah is in his life.
And then, around episode nine, it starts to really go downhill and the Imugi plot takes ahold of the entire narrative. Spoiler, Nam Ji-ah finds her parents, but then after then the plot starts to sputter off and she kind of loses a purpose? She plays the villain too, which is pretty interesting because she isn’t believable.
Characters are fairly solid in this movie. I found the best chemistry to be between the brothers Lee Yeon and Yi Rang, who had the perfect amount of tension and anger and hurt in their relationship. The relationship between the veterinarian companion of Lee Yeon and the Russian fox girl was also an interesting choice for the side relationship.
I think the key problem with this drama is that so much is left unanswered and there’s a bunch of discrepancies. I don’t want to go int detail for the sake of spoilers, but one key thing is how was Ji-ah even rescued from the wreckage her parents disappeared from? It doesn’t make sense. The ending is also very confusing and leaves you with some emotions that aren’t very good, like confusion and maybe slight anger.
Overall Thoughts
Watch this if you’re bored and want to watch something with really good production values. For some reason I keep returning to this drama and rewatching it.
I think it’s for the performance of Lee Dong-wook and Lee Rang. They made the drama for me. They had a really good concept, but they need to tighten the script up a bit more before producing this because of the sheer number of holes that were present within it.
Our female lead seems to forget what exactly her motives and background is, while the Imugi is just strange. If you’re coming in after Goblin, you might be a tad (or greatly) disappointed.
