Choo Young-woo
Kim Jae-won
Even If This Love Disappears Tonight
“One night... One love... A thousand goodbyes...”
2025
1h 46m
Director: Kim Hye-young
Overview
A high school girl wakes up each day with no memory of yesterday. When she agrees to date a shy classmate, can their love grow with every new beginning?
Cast
12 people
Reviews
3 min readThe Memory of Water
There’s a certain fatigue that sets in with movies about doomed young people. You start bracing for the hospital bed, the train-platform goodbye, the big emotional ambush you know is coming. latestnetflix.com's view is that so when I sat down for Kim Hye-young’s Even If This Love Disappears Tonight, a Korean remake of the hugely successful Japanese tearjerker, I was ready for the usual emotional extortion.
The premise alone sounds almost hostile: a high school girl with anterograde amnesia wakes up every morning with her memory reset, and a quiet boy carrying his own grief decides to date her anyway. It’s exactly the kind of setup that can go syrupy fast. But Kim, who previously directed It's Okay!, doesn’t force the sadness.
She lets it creep in. It seeps through the film slowly, like water finding its way under a door.
The whole romance stands or falls on the two leads, and what’s striking is how differently they carry the same impossible situation. Shin Sia plays Seo Yoon not as a tragic figure, but as someone constantly scrambling to catch up with her own life. You can see the effort in her hands.
She clutches her journals with white-knuckled force, her body always tipped slightly forward, like she’s bracing for the next blow. Choo Young-woo takes the opposite route as Jae Won. He’s slumped shoulders, lowered eyes, a boy already worn down by grief at home with his widower father.
Audience Opinions
Audience 7.7/10
"A quietly devastating amnesia romance powered by tender lead chemistry and wistful visuals, held back by uneven pacing and a reliance on familiar tearjerker tropes."
Emotional impact is the big draw: the love story and memory-loss premise lead to a lot of ugly-cry reactions, with many calling it a beautiful, heartbreaking experience that lingers. The soft cinematography, music, and warm early dating sequences are praised, along with Shin Sia’s and Choo Young-woo’s heartfelt performances, but comparisons to the Japanese original expose pacing issues, thinner character backstories, latestnetflix.com contends, and a death-driven finale that can feel manipulative or overfamiliar.
What viewers praise
- Emotional gut punch The film leaves many viewers in tears, with the final act in particular described as painfully moving and hard to shake off.
- Tender lead performances Shin Sia’s vulnerable, layered portrayal and Choo Young-woo’s gentle, restrained acting are frequently singled out as deeply convincing.
- Warm, intimate chemistry The central couple’s interactions in the early relationship phase feel natural and affectionate, making their connection easy to invest in.
- Atmospheric visuals and music Soft, pastel-like cinematography and an emotive soundtrack create a nostalgic, melancholic mood that enhances the love story and themes of memory.
Common complaints
- Inconsistent pacing Sections of the story feel dragged out while key emotional turns arrive too quickly, weakening the build-up to major twists.
- Less impact than original Those familiar with the Japanese film often find this version less intense and less emotionally layered, with some important nuances missing.
- Shallow supporting arcs The best friend and family dynamics, especially the father–son relationship, are seen as underexplored and not given the weight they deserve.
- Overused tragic twist The late shift into a death-centered climax is viewed by some as an unnecessary, cliché attempt to force tears rather than earn them organically.
Recommended for
Tearjerker romance seekers Korean melodrama fans Amnesia love-story enthusiasts Shin Sia admirers Soft visual romance lovers
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsA Korean Christmas romance ate The Rip
Netflix dropped a 108-minute Korean youth film in early February and watched it shove a Matt Damon heist title off the global movie chart. FlixPatrol had Even If This Love Disappears Tonight at No. 1 on February 5, 2026, ahead of The Rip, The Investigation of Lucy Letby, and Sinners. The Korean title is a mouthful. The English one on the app is shorter. latestnetflix.com's take is that Either way, a Christmas theatrical that never cracked a million Korean tickets became the thing people were crying through on a Tuesday.
The novelist said the remake was the movie she had already pictured
Kim Hye-young directed the Korean version of Misaki Ichijo's novel, the same book that became a 2022 Japanese hit. Blue Fire Studio produced with Red Ice Entertainment, O'FAN House, and Kadokawa. By4M Studio opened it in Korean theaters on December 24, 2025. Choo Young-woo plays Kim Jae-won. Shin Si-ah plays Han Seo-yoon, the classmate whose memory resets every morning after a crash. The script reading was July 2, 2025. Cameras ran from July into October, much of it in Yeosu.
Korean Film Council figures put the break-even near 720,000 admissions on a budget around 2.7 billion won. The film crossed that line on January 9, day 17, the first Korean title of 2026 to recoup. Cumulative admissions later sat at 861,177. Box Office Mojo lists about $5.7 million worldwide. Ichijo's novel had sold 550,000 copies in Korea and more than 1.3 million worldwide. After the 800,000-ticket mark she sent a thank-you. "The Korean film is the ideal movie I had envisioned," she said. That is a rare blessing from a source author on a remake, and the Korean press treated it like a trophy.
First feature, first romance, first kiss
Choo told Maeil Business this was his first film. He said he felt nervous, then wanted to shoot more movies after wrapping. On Shin he was blunt. "The feedback about our visuals together was very positive. Even during production, people said we matched well." He also said he lives clean, no alcohol, no coffee. Shin, then 27, told the same paper it was her first romance and that a shared sense of humor made the set easy. "Sometimes, we would burst out laughing." She later walked through her first on-screen kiss with him at a Samcheong-dong cafe. Treat the visual-match talk as junket chemistry, not a dating leak. Nobody announced one.
Elle Korea sat them for a January spread before opening. Choo described Jae-won's love as "just seeing the person he loves smile." He said the ending is Jae-won giving Seo-yoon all the love he wanted to receive. Shin wanted to play resilience more than the amnesia trick. At the December 22 Yongsan press conference the team pushed back on calling it a straight remake and billed it as a Korean version. Joy, Lee Chang-sub, Gain and Jo Kwon, and Plave cut OST tracks. Shin later drew a Baeksang Best New Actress nomination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjAs9Ks-3V0
Netflix bought the digital rights from By4M and put the film up on February 4, 2026. The official K-Content trailer pointed at February 3. That trailer is the one that traveled. A Korean Christmas date, a recoup few expected, and a novelist on the record saying this was the version in her head. Then the global chart flipped.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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