Could a love alarm guide your love life? Song Kang, Kim So Hyun and Jung Ga Ram star in a drama that

No form of media captures the pain and euphoria of falling in love quite like Korean TV dramas, even if such scenarios occasionally rely on romantic cliches. The new rom com, Love Alarm, gives the familiar genre a fresh twist by imagining a world where smartphones can tell anyone who downloads a Love Alarm app if someone nearby is in love with them.

The app creates as many problems as it solves. While it’s possible to imagine that a love app can help people avoid embarrassing mistakes—such as, say, confessing feelings to the wrong person—it doesn’t quite work out that way. Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint which person in a crowd is sending that love signal. Some people never get a ping. Naturally popular and attractive people suffer from the annoyance of non-stop pings. Furthermore, not everyone—due to a lack of money or a lack of interest—has downloaded the app.

Having—or not having— the app only complicates life for the main characters in this k-drama, which is based on the popular webtoon Love Alarm by Kye Young Chan.

Kim So Hyun, plays the drama’s heroine JoJo. She’s an adult at the start of the drama, but the storyline quickly takes her back to school, where she’s a poor orphan, working the multiple, part-time jobs that k-drama heroines must often manage alongside schoolwork.

Jung Ga Ram, who won a 2016 Daejong Film Award for Best New Actor, for his role the film Fourth Place, plays her co-worker Lee Hye Yeong. His character secretly has a crush on her, but is too shy to say anything and neither of them have downloaded the Love Alarm app. His ability to confess his feelings is soon further complicated by the reappearance of his rich, attractive friend, Hwang Sun Oh, played by rising rookie actor Song Kang. Song has been in four dramas since his debut in 2017 and currently also plays a role in When The Devil Calls Your Name.

Everyone is in love with Hwang Sun Oh or so the Love Alarm app makes it seem. When he meets JoJo and her phone doesn’t ping, he’s intrigued. This is standard fare for plucky poor girl-jaded rich boy k-dramas, but hopefully the love app will take this storyline somewhere interesting.

Kim So Hyun is well cast as JoJo and was one of the actresses fans of the manga hoped would fill the role. Kim, who began her career as a child actress in 2006, transitions seamlessly from the young woman viewers first meet to the high school student in the flashback. K-drama audiences have watched the actress grow up from playing the child empress in Moon Embracing The Sun to appearing as a girl caught up in tragedy in Missing You and then seen her take leading roles in Hey Ghost, Let’s Fight and Radio Romance. Together, the three young actors create a compelling love triangle.

Another thing that makes the first episode of this drama interesting is that two of the lead actors kiss without even professing they are in love. Korean dramas tend to be conservative with romantic dramas often waiting until the ninth or tenth episode for the lead actors to even share the chastest of kisses. In this drama, the actors not only kiss but it’s obvious they are just curious and drawn to each other.

Apps do make life simpler but they can also complicate it. Hopefully, the drama will offer clues as to whether a Love Alarm might work in real life or whether falling in love should really happen the old fashioned way.

Love Alarm was produced by Netflix in conjunction with Studio Dragon.

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