Love Untangled

The Geometry of Teenage Longing

At nineteen, a mirror can feel like an enemy. *Love Untangled* understands that humiliating intensity and builds an entire coming-of-age romance around it. Set in 1998 Busan, the film follows Park Se-ri (Shin Eun-soo), who has decided her frizzy, uncooperative hair is the one thing standing between her and her crush, Kim Hyun (Cha Woo-min). It is a tiny premise, almost flimsy if you describe it too plainly, but the movie treats that panic with the seriousness it deserves. For Se-ri, this is not vanity. It is survival.



Director Namkoong Sun gets that difference. From the outside, Se-ri's obsession with tracking down a "Seoul magical straightening treatment" could play as a cute joke. From the inside, it feels like a full-body crisis, and the film stays close to that perspective. Anyone who lived through the beauty pressures of the late nineties will probably feel a little phantom pain watching it. Namkoong told TIME magazine that Korean film leaves less room for the "shamelessly fussy romanticism" of TV dramas, and the movie mostly honors that. The imagery is warm without becoming glossy. School uniforms still look stiff. Salons still look cramped. My main hesitation is the runtime: two hours is a lot to ask from a story this delicate, and you can feel the script stretching small misunderstandings until they start to sag.



The film sharpens whenever Han Yun-seok enters. Gong Myung plays the Seoul transfer student, whose mother just happens to be a stylist, with a calm presence that balances Se-ri's storm of self-consciousness. Their first real interaction is where the movie snaps into focus. Shin Eun-soo keeps Se-ri's whole body on alert—shoulders tucked high, hands fussing with her bangs, every movement trying to become smaller. Gong, by contrast, lets his long frame drift into an easy slouch, quiet enough that her nerves do most of the scene's work. It is a simple dynamic, but it gives the romance an actual pulse.



The blind spot is pretty clear. As Aisha Alli-Balogun wrote in CherryChu Magazine, the movie "doesn't dive into bigger questions about beauty culture in Korea," and that absence lingers. Straight hair remains the unquestioned ideal, even though the story is built around how punishing that standard can be. There is also the unavoidable fact that Gong Myung, charming as he is, was thirty-one while playing a teenager, and sometimes that age gap shows no matter how generous you feel toward genre convention.

Still, the movie lands because it never mocks the rawness of adolescence. Under the predictable triangle and the hair-treatment plotting, *Love Untangled* taps into something real: how terrifying and funny it is to live inside a body that suddenly feels like public evidence against you.