What a viewWhy Netflix K-drama It’s Okay to Not Be Okay is not the drippy romantic comedy you expect
All is not what it seems in this sinister fairy tale-meets-love story that combines live action and animation
With a title that resonates intensely in these increasingly inclusive, deeply caring days, It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (Netflix) looks like another drippy romantic comedy-drama in which certain Seoul studios specialise. In fact, it’s an expectation trampler of considerable finesse.
The works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman echo through this often twisted, live action and animation combination of love story and sinister fairy tale. With her fables of nightmares, abandonment and revenge, children’s author Ko Mun-yeong (Seo Ye-ji) stamps out all juvenile misconceptions about the planet being any sort of beautiful place.
And back in daily life she tries hard to live up to the ideals of her characters, being generally obnoxious, always aloof, profoundly contemptuous of society and everyone in it and – because she’s a literary superstar – habitually in receipt of everything she wants, precisely when she wants it.
But there’s something she can’t have, which infuriates her. A confirmed loner, Ko suddenly finds her world wobbling when she meets psychiatric hospital nursing assistant Moon Gang-tae (Kim Soo-hyun), the one person who stands up to her and the only man impervious to her radiant, if chilly, beauty. Naturally, being an ice queen, Ko won’t admit she’s in love with Moon, but neither can she prevent her obsessive desire for him spilling over into harassment.
Her actions and attitudes seem to confirm Ko as the witch of her own terrifying tales. Moon, meanwhile, looks like an innocent victim of female fixation, a clean-cut, good-hearted, level-headed younger brother who provides and cares for his mentally disabled sibling. Too good to be true? Probably, which means we’re due some serious role reversal as weekly episodes build.
Seo’s suitably scary author could be the long-lost sister of the Brothers Grimm, so austere is her personality (and potentially lethal her love of obsidian-sharp knives). Her personal policy of antisocial distancing (except when it comes to Moon) means that, really, she just wants to be loved but will the handsome young hero prove up to the task? Will he bother to indulge her whims? Can love soothe their respective emotional traumas? Or is their awkward relationship destined to remain as clunky as the English translation of the series title?