Although actress Park Eun-bin might not monopolize the title of "Queen of Ratings" on the small screen every single time, she is undoubtedly a trustworthy actress who has consistently recorded excellent box-office results in almost every project she appears in, built upon the firm trust of the public. Her heavy power to lead a work and her ability to digest characters in detail have always received favorable reviews from viewers and critics alike. The project that stood at the absolute pinnacle of her dazzling box-office records was the drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo, which enjoyed nationwide, syndrome-level popularity. Through this work, she perfectly established herself not just as a commercially successful actress, but as an irreplaceable top star who simultaneously proved her outstanding acting skills and star power.
Even after the massive success of Extraordinary Attorney Woo, she did not settle for a single image. Instead, she has steadily broadened her acting spectrum by fearlessly portraying various contrasting characters across diverse works. Most recently, she appeared in the Netflix original drama Wonder Fools, showcasing yet another new face to global viewers. In fact, if you closely examine Park Eun-bin's filmography, you will see that she has never solely focused on typical, lighthearted romantic comedy genres. However, in well-made romance dramas that highlight deep emotional lines between characters, such as The King's Affection or Do You Like Brahms?, she has always demonstrated exceptional acting prowess and left a lingering resonance.
Having shown such excellent results in orthodox romance works, she has now returned to viewers with a new drama titled Chilling Romance, where romance and horror are bizarrely combined. As can be immediately deduced from the title, the drama Chilling Romance is a work based on the eponymous movie that is already intimately familiar to the public. Because the reputation of the original film, which received immense love in the past starring Son Ye-jin and Lee Min-ki, is so renowned, it gathered tremendous attention even before its broadcast. However, once the veil was lifted, the actual development and narrative of the drama proved to be so vastly different from the original movie that it is safe to call it an entirely new creation.
This drama borrowed only one core fantasy setting from the original movie—that "the female lead can see ghosts that others cannot"—and wove a completely new universe. That setting alone is an interesting enough subject to stimulate viewers' curiosity, and on top of that, solid and attractive youth actors Park Eun-bin, Yang Se-jong, and Ong Seong-wu step forward as the three main leads to anchor the center of the play. Looking back, we can surprisingly note that the dramas where Park Eun-bin has starred as the lead have rarely been massive, blockbuster-scale epics that invest astronomical production costs or heavily rely solely on flashy spectacles and CGI.
Rather than chasing stable blockbusters that guarantee box-office success, she has firmly built her own unrivaled filmography by primarily selecting works with fresh setups and original narratives slightly infused with an experimental spirit. In that sense, Chilling Romance is also a work that stands out for its genre-bending experimental spirit, mixing horror, mystery, and romance. The biggest point of interest is what kind of new transformation Park Eun-bin will show within this complex genre. In the drama, the protagonist 'Chun Yeo-ri', played by Park Eun-bin, outwardly appears to be a second-generation chaebol heiress possessing immense wealth that anyone would envy. Yet, she emerges as a multi-dimensional character burdened with a tragic fate of routinely seeing terrifying ghosts invisible to others' eyes.
The most intriguing and fatal part of Chun Yeo-ri's character setup is that others who make direct physical contact with her, such as holding hands, also experience the bizarre phenomenon of temporarily seeing ghosts. Because of this terrifying phenomenon, Chun Yeo-ri lives with extreme caution, absolutely avoiding holding hands or even lightly touching people in her daily life, in order to prevent transferring extreme fear to oblivious others. As a result, she is constantly misunderstood by those around her as a cold, arrogant, bloodless, and tearless chaebol. However, from her perspective, this is a lonely and sorrowful choice she must inevitably endure to hide her fatal secret and protect others.
The person who becomes recklessly entangled in Chun Yeo-ri's life, which is lived so thoroughly disconnected from the world, is 'Ma Kang-wook', played by actor Yang Se-jong. Ma Kang-wook appears as a passionate prosecutor possessing a strong sense of professional duty, someone who charges forward through fire and water solely for the sake of uncovering the truth for unjustly wronged victims and apprehending vicious criminals. Adding to this, actor Ong Seong-wu, who has perfectly transitioned from an idol to a stable actor, takes on the role of 'Kang Min-hwan', the CEO of a large hotel, injecting a chilling tension into the play. In particular, it is predicted that Ong Seong-wu, who previously had a strong image as a sweet and upright young man, will play an unfathomable, cruel villain for the first time in his acting career through this work, further heightening viewers' expectations.
The main narrative of the play begins to swirl into a massive vortex when ghosts—who wander the living world after meeting unjust and gruesome deaths—approach Chun Yeo-ri, the only person who can perceive their existence, to desperately plead for help. Most of the ghosts are victims who were wrongfully murdered, but they have absolutely no way to exercise realistic physical force. Thus, they have no choice but to persistently beg Chun Yeo-ri, the only one who sees them, to catch the real culprits. Coincidentally, every gruesome crime scene Chun Yeo-ri inevitably visits to soothe these ghosts' grievances perfectly overlaps with the investigation routes of Prosecutor Ma Kang-wook, who is tenaciously digging into the whole story of the murder cases, leading to continuous, unavoidable, fateful encounters between the two.
In the process of repeatedly running into each other as if by chance and becoming deeply entangled, Ma Kang-wook will inevitably end up holding Chun Yeo-ri's hand. Eventually, as he falls into a shocking situation of witnessing the unseen ghosts himself, the two will develop a special relationship sharing a secret they cannot tell anyone else. This development—where they collaborate to solve mysterious murder cases, gradually feel mutual affection, and fall into a deep romance—is the main backbone penetrating this drama. Normally, such complex-genre dramas place very provocative or intense opening scenes early on to instantly capture the viewers' attention. In contrast, the directing of the crucial scene where Ma Kang-wook and Chun Yeo-ri bizarrely meet for the first time at a murder scene felt somewhat flat and one-dimensional, noticeably lacking the power to strongly pull in early immersion.
Chilling Romance basically purports to be a sweet and delightful romantic comedy, while simultaneously mixing in a myriad of genres all at once: occult elements, spine-chilling horror, and a mystery thriller digging into suffocating incidents. The viewership rating for the first broadcast recorded 3.1%, starting off with a somewhat ambiguous scorecard that is neither terribly bad nor particularly good. Even if the episodes up to the second broadcast are an essential build-up process to accumulate the full-scale narrative going forward, it is hard to erase the impression that they somewhat distractingly laid out too much bait and vast setups. While there is certainly enough intention to keep watching steadily until the latter half when the play unfolds and the two's romance deepens, considering the somewhat scattered directing and development in the early stages, it is difficult to shake off the concern that this might record the most painful, lowest viewership rating among Park Eun-bin's past works. A rather arduous journey is expected ahead to pull off a dramatic rebound in viewership.
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