Review: ‘Love Next Door’ Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts

Love Next Door has no right to be as affecting and compelling as it is. As far as romantic K-Dramas go, this is as tropey and formulaic as they get. The leads are good, but they always are. There’s no sense that this will offer any surprises at all, or that it will amount to anything beyond exactly what people imagined it to be after the first two episodes.

And yet it’s a hit. It’s beloved. It’s legitimately engaging and charming. It might even be special.

How can this be? It’s hard to put a finger on, and in my coverage of it I’ve often used the word “intangibles”. Love Next Door isn’t interested in doing anything that hasn’t been done before – in fact, it’s very openly reminiscent of other, similar shows, particularly Welcome to Samdal-ri and Doctor Slump – but understands the importance of doing the familiar stuff well. It has a lot of just-right qualities; just-right cast, just-right tone, just-right pace.

The result is one of the better K-Dramas of 2024, certainly on Netflix, which is impressive when you think about it.

The plot finds Seok-ryu (Jung So-min) returning to Korea with her life in tatters. Her high-flying career in a U.S.-based company has been curtailed and she caught her fiancé cheating. Seok-ryu initially downplays the circumstances, but her mother, overly concerned – as Korean matriarchs tend to be – with the family’s social standing, isn’t about to let her off the hook.

Seok-ryu is the classic messy but relatable female lead. You’ve met her before, in one form or another. She exhibits several other very familiar characteristics too, such as being a workaholic and defining herself entirely by her career success (and, in this case, failure.)

But she needs a foil. Enter, then, Choi Seung-hyo (Jung Hae-in), her childhood friend and neighbor. He’s different in just about every way. His career is going well, he made the right decisions, and he’s a calming influence when Seok-ryu’s life is collapsing around her ears. There’s just one, slight problem – Seung-hyo has been meaning to confess his romantic feelings since their shared childhood and never got around to it.

Love Next Door | Image via Netflix

You know where this is going. Opposites attract. Boy-meets-girl-next-door. These are overly familiar dynamics, but Love Next Door handles them with a real sense of charm. Seok-ryu’s professional and personal chaos isn’t annoying like it could be; you feel for her predicament and want to understand what led her to her decisions. Seung-hyo’s buttoned-up aloofness clearly comes from somewhere – but where?

As the episodes progress the K-Drama unravels, through both flashbacks and present-day sequences, the complex relationship between these two characters, stretching back to childhood innocence and leading all the way to current dependency. The chemistry is there between the leads for sure, but the triumph is really in the writing, which sketches this longstanding partnership through the years and various iterations. It isn’t all hopeless pining, but genuine connection and warmth.

And then the evolutions occur. This is where the satisfaction comes from. Seok-ryu’s dangerous early impulsiveness gives way to a thoughtful acknowledgment of her experiences and traumas, and Seung-hyo’s unspoken feelings become real regrets, and the potential for him to get a do-over becomes as important for us, the audience, as it does for him. It’d be so easy to get this wrong that it’s a minor miracle Love Next Door gets it so right.

It isn’t just about these two, of course. The second leads have their own obligatory subplots, but a lot of texture is provided by the supporting cast in largely familial roles, whose dynamics are interesting because of how closely-knit both leads’ families have been over the years. There were too-easy avenues to take here – such as Seok-ryu’s mother being uncomplicatedly awful, or for Seung-hyo to have a perfect relationship with his parents to mimic his relatively frictionless career path – but Love Next Door swerves them to instead explore more thoughtful and complex angles.

I’m telling you with relative confidence that in the future, Love Next Door won’t just be regarded as a decent K-Drama. It’ll be special to a lot of people who happen to watch it at just the right time. It’ll resonate on a deeper level than they expected, and they might not be able to articulate why. It’s my job to do so, and I still can’t.

There are movies and TV shows that are slavishly devoted to cliché. They treat tropes like flat-pack furniture, as if just assembling the right pieces means a workable product will be there at the end. Love Next Door almost treats its predictable building blocks like a challenge, as if it has a mandate to prove that a familiar story can be told so well that in the end it starts to feel new again.