Oh My Ghostess – Review

The probability of being disappointed or frustrated or even angry when you’re dealing with goths, possession and stealing else’s body is quite high (hello there Big). A lust ghost possessing a young woman in order to resolve her grudge? Of course you can count me in but still I started Oh My Ghostess with some worries. I was worried to witness another big mess (hellooo again Big). But I quickly found out all my fears were unfounded! Could the time I spent with Oh My Ghostess have been sweeter than that? Give me one second… I don’t think so. I can’t recall I character I profoundly disliked (**Spoilers** Was there any hateful and despicable character in the drama? We can discuss about officer Choi Sung-jae, but I’m sure we’ll even reach to a compromise about his degree of evilness **End of Spoilers**), I can’t recall a moment I found myself bored to death. Of course, the drama had his own flaws and some dejà vu scenes but who truly cares when the overall feeling is that good? 

I loved many things about Oh My Ghostess. From the chemistry between the leads, the funny relationship between Kang Sun-Woo and his employees, the strange friendship between the shaman and the Sun-woo’s mom, to the complicity between Na Bong-Sun and Shin Soon-Ae.  It wasn’t only ‘the leads and sometimes the rest of the cast’, it was a nice and warm whole that made the drama a wholehearted show.

Na Bong-Sun

Oh My Ghostess is Park Bo-Young’s first drama in years. She’s been stuck to movies for years (with big successes like Speedy Scandal or A Werewolf Boy). After several troubles with her agency, she finally signed her comeback to dramaland with the role of Na Bong-sun. What a brilliant choice, what a wise decision. Both for her and for us! Na Bong-Sun is a young girl who inherited her grand-mom’s gift: she can sees ghosts. More a curse than a gift, Bong-Sun has suffer from that ability since childhood. Consequences? She has no friends (who can possibly understand she sees ghosts?), she’s shy and withdrawn and has zero self-confidence. Great picture! She works at Kang Sun-woo’s restaurant. She’s been in love with her boss since the beginning. But incapable to answer with anything other than onomatopoeia, it’s absolutely unthinkable for her to confess to her cold boss. Despite the fact that she lives in a students’ room with her rosaries, garlic and ancestral anti-ghosts weapons, she loves her job even if she never found the blossoming in it. The ghosts never really let her bloom in anything anyway. She’s not considered neither by Kang Sun-woo nor her co-workers. Blame it on her daily encounters with ghosts. She doubts herself, her talent, her ambition, her competences. So she hides herself behind a computer and a blog to share her passion of cooking. Na Bong-sun’s kind of character you want to slap once, not in order to hurt her but to bring some life in her because you know she’s capable of more than that!

Shin Soon-Ae

I’ve discovered Kim Seul-gi in Flower Boy Next Door back in 2013. Her role of the wild insomniac editor cracked me up. She was hilarious, crazy and endearing enough to become one of my favorite character in it. I welcomed her confirmation to Oh My Ghostess with a dance of joy. I knew she’ll rock it and she did. She was funny, touching and pitiful. Shin Soon-Ae died early in her life. She never knew nor experienced love. Her one sided love for Officer Choi Sung-jae (Lim Ju-Hwan) cannot really be considered as an experience. Painful, nothing else. She died unexperienced and the ghost she became has to clear that one grudge that keeps her in this world and prevent her from follow the light: to make love with a man (a good looking one if she can choose). Talk about a serious grudge. In order to find peace, she goes possessing one woman after another. Not easy and not morally good, but she’s a ghost, she doesn’t care at all, who can say it’s not right? Well that shaman could (Lee Jung-eun). She’s a nice one, but still a shaman. If she can see ghosts (that’s part of her job naturally) she can also put spells on them and even force some of them to go through a painful ritual to go to heaven. So our little young ghost has to find a guy that will make her go to a better place before getting caught by that shaman. It’s doable in theory, but things aren’t always as easy as it seems.

 
Kang Sun-woo 

I’ve liked Jo Jung-seok since his breakout role in What’s Up (2011). He played a complex character, talented but torn between his passion and his lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. He was just right, sincere, authentic, ardent in it I could only love him. He’s now charming and irresistible to my eyes, no matter what he does. And there’s no exception with Oh My Ghostess. He plays Kang Sun-woo, chef of the Sun restaurant. Jo Jung-seok took the hundred-times-seen arrogant character and turned him into a funny, lovable and adorkable chef. Me want more like him 

Sun-woo is a passionate chef, full of himself but deeply in love good cuisine. He always tries to take his cooking and specialities to another level. If he’s passionate about his food, he’s less into people. He loves his employees, he’s ready to do anything for them, but just don’t ask him to be demonstrative. He loves his mom but no way on earth, he’ll show it. He rather eat rice for the rest of his life (and that’s the last straw for a rice hater!) That’s exactly where Sun-woo is funny and touching and cute: he’s full of contradictions. He’ll say no with authority, to give in the next minute, he’ll be harsh only to be the kindest guy on earth few seconds after. He’s actually a sweet guy, a teddy bear disguised into an awful and disagreeable boss. He’s a touching and adorkable bipolar chef as I like to call him.

 

The Romance
Romancing a ghost isn’t a childplay. No joke, go ask Sun-woo, he’ll agree with me. It’s nice and romantic in the first place like every other love story out there. But when reality hits you in the face like a tornado at the season, you even start doubting your sanity. If I never had any fears about Oh My Ghostess on any other aspects (humour, characters’ interactions, logic of the events), the romance was the only thing that got me scared. Love triangle with humans is already a huge headache but if you have a ghost as one of the aspirants you’re surely have a bigger problem. To be frank, I didn’t even see the love triangle coming.  

We know from the get go Na Bong-Sun is in love with Sun-woo but the feeling isn’t exactly reciprocal. Far from that. She’s almost transparent and you hardly fall in love with transparency. Soon-Ae is looking for a man that will (involuntary) help her clear her grudge. So when the second possess the first one it’s only on that purpose. That’s the initial plan but that’s when several unexpected things happened: 

1) Na Bong-sun will be kicked out of her room for some reasons. Soon-Ae is in her body at that precise moment. What to do? Go to the only place related to Bong-sun: the restaurant. The persistent and stubborn Soon-Ae will convince a reluctant Kang Sun-woo, to let her stay for few days. The cohabitation of any kind in rom-coms is always a super excuse for complicity, intimacy special moments. I love that! 
2) Kang Sun-Woo happens to be Shin Soon-Ae’s man of vitality. The perfect match for this ghost in demand. No need to look for someone else, it has to be him, it will be him.
3) In Bong-sun’s body, Soon-Ae can spend some time with her father and brother. So if she can borrow her body a bit more, that won’t hurt. 

4) After waltz of ‘I’m in your body’, ‘I’m not anymore’, ‘Please let me possess you once again’, ‘I swear it’s the last time’, ‘I don’t need your opinion, ‘I’m going to possess you anyway’, Soon-Ae and Bong- Sun will eventually become accomplices and even more, friends. Soon-Ae needs Sun-Woo for her eternal peace and Bong-Sun wants to win her boss’ heart. As Soon-Ae says it appropriately: ‘It’s a win-win situation!’ Aaah I like girl’s associations. Especially when those are dangerous ones. One outgoing ghost and a super shy girl hands in hands to make a man lie down (to say it bluntly) what more could we expect? I wanted fun, zippy, implausible situations and that’s all I got. While possessing Bong-Sun’s body, Soon-Ae will put everything in place to make Sun-Woo fall in love. Actually that part won’t be hard, the most difficult one will be to persuade to have sex…as soon as possible! It’s not as easy as it seems, the guy is a romantic one (I wasn’t lying he’s teddy bear inside.) 

Soon-Ae will also step on Lee So-hyung’s toes (Park Jung-ah). She’s tall, successful, beautiful, the old friend of Sun-woo and the object of his affections for years. He never confessed to her (probably too afraid to lose her) and she never said anything either. We all know the saying ‘Your never know what you got till it’s gone’. Lee So-hyung will finally decide to conquer Sun-woo’s heart the precise moment she realized she might lose him to Na Bong-sun. You know she probably always liked him except her heart didn’t know it yet. Way too complicate. Speak when you have to or while you can.

No time for anyone’s considerations, Soon-Ae has few weeks to go before becoming an evil spirit. And it’s no pretty becoming one. You not only force the possessed one to do horrible deeds, you’re stuck on earth for ever. No hope for heaven, no way back, no second chance, nothing. You’re stuck for eternity. When I said, it wasn’t pretty. 

So the plan is in place for both girls. Sun-woo of course, isn’t aware of it. I mean who will voluntarily cooperate with a ghost? I’m asking you. But even with the most brilliant plan things don’t always go as planned. The only culprit here is love. It will ruin the strategy in place and will lead to jealousy.That’s why I said I didn’t see the love triangle coming. Soon-Ae is determinate to clear her grudge and go to heaven. I never imagined she’ll fall for Sun-woo in the process. 

But can she be blamed for that? Sun-woo’s sweet, considerate, charming, passionate, in love, protective and cute to the moon and back. For a young ghost, gone without never been loved and desired and cherished, isn’t almost logic to fall in love? I would have fall and hardly! She discovered feelings she never knew and couldn’t her help myself. That’s how you end up fighting with a ghost over a man. Thank God, the drama didn’t spend tons of episodes on it. I mean Bong-Sun and Soon-Ae did fight over Sun-woo but that didn’t last. The drama would have lost me somewhere on the road if it wasn’t the case. It’s a pointless fight for Soon-Ae, with few weeks to go and a grudge to clear, does she have the time for that? No but you can’t always win over your heart. But she will put herself together to realize that more than senseless it’s tiring. It’s over for her but not for Bong-sun. She’ll decide to help her out and while doing so she’ll slowly understand she has to refocus: the grudge she needs to resolve might not be the one she was initially thinking of. How did she die? Was is really a suicide as it was establish by the police? What happened to her missing phone? Why didn’t she left a note before her suicide?  

Sun-woo fell in love. That’s a fact. Yes but with whom? The cheerful and outgoing Shin Soon-Ae or the timid Na Bong-sun or maybe a mix of the two? Where’s the limit in this complex relationship? Hard to tell, and it’s probably even harder for Sun-woo to tell. Feelings aren’t things you can always have control on. You end up in love and you can’t really put word on it. You just love and that’s it. Sun-woo slowly developed feelings for Bong-sun. Whenever it was really her or Soon-Ae he fell for someone he never considered. How more incontrollable is that? 

No matter how hard it is to put words on feelings, Bong-sun needs to know: is it her or Soon-Ae? Kang Sun-woo keeps talking about memories and moments she can’t recall. Something isn’t clearly right and Bong-sun knows it. But for a short instant she just wants to think about herself, she want to enjoy the present, and the present is Sun-woo and her. But as a matter of fact, you can’t ignore reality for too long. Bong-sun loves Sun-woo but it’s not honest, she’s not true with him and neither is she with herself. It’s tile for confessions here! Sun-woo will deal with the news awesomely. I mean he could have fainted, stayed in a coma for weeks and woke up thinking everything was a bad dream or ask the most irritant question in the world: Noogoosaeyo? Instead he managed the situation smoothly and gently: he handled Soon-Ae with kid gloves (nothing can possibly happen between them) and protected, reassured Bong-sun: he can precisely say whenever he was with Soon-Ae or Bong-sun but one thing is for sure, he’s in love with the girl in front of him! Aaaaah someone take me to hiiiiiim! It’s probably cliché, but it’s a cliché that works perfectly on me. Yes we had the classic love triangle but the drama didn’t deal with it for couple of episodes. We surely had other things to take care of, find out about Soon-Ae’s death for example.

The romance in Oh My Ghostess was a good one, the kind of romance that makes you grow, that bring you something invaluable change them in the good way. The kind of love that make you realize what’s important in life and cherish every tiny little moment. 

Sun’s restaurant’s team

How can I express the feelings I have for them? They made me laugh of course, but they were mostly (mostly) endearing! Each with his own personality but awesome and crazy as a whole. A good alchemy that brought another special and sweet touch to the drama. The restaurant was the principal environment of the drama, they had to put extra efforts into it. As I like to say, it’s not only about the leads, make your supporting cast worthy it (sometimes that can even save your drama). But no need to save anything here, everything was in place: the team interaction, their teasing, their deep love for one another, their relationship with the chef. Everything was just right! If you ask me, they could do a special episode focused only on the team! 

Officer Choi Sung-jae (Lim Ju-hwan)

What a strange character. The goal was surely to make him that strange. Ambiguous, enigmatic, mysterious, always nice, sometimes irascible, Officer Choi Sung-jae is the bipolar character by excellence. Responsible, good worker, helpful, courteous to everyone in the neighbour he has a dark side. He hide a lot of things and prefers to burry some events of the past. Not really responsible for a cop. Nope. He’s married to Kang Sun-woo’s little sister, Kang Eun-hee (Shin Hye-sun) and basically he’s loved by everyone: from Sun-woo’s mom to all the neighbourhood. Hard to tell the officer has dark secrets.

I still don’t know how I feel regarding how the drama managed this character. Well it’s a rom-com and it’s always better to have a happy end and all that but in this case I don’t think it would have been a bad idea to actually make the officer die.  **Spoilers** The poor guy was possessed the whole time, so technically it isn’t his fault. I’m not trying to make him go away with his actions. In the facts he did all he did. He killed and lied. I mean go and try to explain to a jury that the criminal isn’t responsible because the only one at fault is the devil spirit that possessed him! So he’s definitely responsible. **End of Spoilers**  But the problem is complex. It would have been better to just make him die. It’s harsh but when that’s the best option out there, you’re not supposed to be picky. In the extreme if you really (really) not ready to kill your character, I suppose the best way to manage the situation is to make him forget everything (his previous life).   

Another point that make me scratch my head. It’s not really clear why the evil spirit choose him. Some will say it’s a pure coincidence, but I would have loved the drama to work a bit more on that part. As I see it, it’s like the evil spirit, who was taking a walk to get some fresh air, bumped into the officer. He thought it could be fun, so entered his body. I wanted more than that, I wanted some development on that side. That said the evil spirit was freaking scary. Don’t know who came with the idea but well done because that spirit freaked me out! 

Sun-woo’s Mom and the Shaman (Jo Hye-young and Lee Jung-eun)

Both were as crazy as endearing and funny. If the drama wouldn’t make them meet, I would made it happen somehow. They were meant to be a duo no matter all the preconceived ideas. Everybody need a drinking buddy after all. They grew up being friends and it was just lovely to watch. 

Shin Myung-ho and Shin Kyung-mo (Lee Dae-yeon and Lee Hak-joo)

The foolish and delusional Soon-Ae’s little brother, Kyung-mo, was as comic as he was cute. I’m not sure he ever accepted her sister’s death. He probably keeps living thinking he’ll forget and the wound would heal on its own. And that surely what his father does on his side. He barely accepted the suicide of his daughter but he courageously tries to bring back to life his already dead and deserted restaurant while trying to take care of his son. Not always easy. I liked how Soon-Ae in Bong-sun’s body was able to spend some time with her father and cheer him a bit up. She also desperately tried to put some sense into her dongsae but that was a little bit more difficult! And because Kung-mo is cute but a bit lost, he’ll end up thinking Bong-sun has feelings for him. Awesome!  

Last Thoughts

Bong-sun’s transformation is one of the winning point of Oh My Ghostess. That only thing is worth to be mentioned because that one thing only changed the perception of the drama. Soon-Ae resolved her grudge but she also changed all the persons around her in a way or another. She came like a tornado without the damages. She made people change in the most positive way possible. And the one who changed the more is of course Na Bong-sun. She blossomed from the shyest thing in the world to an accomplished woman, who knows her value and what she wants. Long live evolving characters!

I was honestly doubtful when, by the end, I hear her talking about leaving. What she need time to study? You can learn with Sun-woo as much as you want. But no matter how much I hate separations, it was evident she needed that to gain self-confidence. Yes she could learn a lot with Sun-woo but somehow in the back of her head, a little voice would always ask: ‘Is it your talent or Sun-woo’s experience? Is it your idea or Sun-woo’s influence?’ 

Park Bo-Young can act! She switched from one character to another in a blink of an eye. Seems easy but it’s not giving to anyone. Some tried but lamentably failed (I won’t cite any names here). She was literally possessed by Soon-Ae and was able to express all her emotions. The beforehand work between the two actresses must have been huge. Or it just worked because Kim Seul-gi is as good as Park Bo-young. The chemistry between the two young women was obvious. God only knows I much I loved this cast!  

Oh My Ghostess had a solid story, good chemistry, took care of the leads but also polished its supportive cast. All that gave us an enjoyable and charming ride. Oh My Ghostess was sweet, childish sometimes, hilarious, witty, innocent, mysterious. That’s what I need from a rom-com, actually I need more of Oh My Ghostess on my screen. Can someone make that possible? Has someone heard me? Hello, anyone?