Summary
When the Phone Rings makes it clear from Episode 1 that we’re dealing with an unusual K-Drama. Will the point of it all become clearer in subsequent episodes? Time will tell.
When the Phone Rings is weird even by K-Drama standards, and that’s obvious right from Episode 1. A loveless marriage of convenience, selective mutism, and self-kidnapping are unusual ingredients, and it isn’t immediately apparent what the point of the cocktail they form really is. But I’m all for odd little stories, especially on mainstream platforms, so at the very least I’ll have fun finding out.
I can see people being very mixed on this, though. At its core is a marriage that is clearly built on false pretences, but the dramatic hook is the idea of a woman recovering her agency by pretending to have kidnapped herself (this will become clearer in a minute.) It’s a drastic interpretation of a relatively mundane idea, that of two people being connected for the wrong reasons and wanting to escape from each other and their circumstances.
The two people are Hee-joo, a TV interpreter with selective mutism, and Sa-eon, a presidential spokesman who is essentially the scapegoat for questionable public policy and risky political decisions. His aptitude is displayed for us in a press briefing wherein he smoothly talks his way through a hostage crisis, but the fractures in the marriage between these two are very obvious. Their public appearance at an embassy party shows the cracks in their foundations; Sa-eon is well-schooled in putting on a front, but Hee-joo’s nervous and out of place.
There’s a lot of catty hostility around Hee-joo in general, and the idea of her having “stolen” someone else’s man is floated around. It’s obvious that she isn’t anyone’s first choice of spouse, and she seems stuck in a situation she’d rather not be in.
A potential way out of this situation takes an unusual form – a kidnapper. While she’s out driving, Hee-joo loses control of her car rather suddenly. It’s quickly revealed that a masked man was controlling it with a device, and he climbs inside with her. He calls So-eon to let him know that he has his wife and plans to kill her, but So-eon’s characteristically unbothered. He’s confident nobody knows who his real wife is, and he double-checks with his mother-in-law that Hee-joo is with her – not accounting for the fact that she’s lying.
When the Phone Rings Episode 1 plays deliberately coy after this. Hee-joo takes control of the car and speeds off, but we don’t see the outcome of her dangerous driving immediately. Instead, thanks to a nonlinear structure, we learn a bit more about her marriage to So-eon, which apparently occurred three years prior. In that time, they’ve barely bothered to speak to each other, so the terms of the arrangement are a little obscure.
Our lack of concrete knowledge about this union is obviously a selling point of the narrative, and it’s clear the mystery of their marriage is going to unfold across multiple episodes. But we get more clarity towards the end of the first episode.
When the “kidnapper” calls So-eon again, we learn it’s actually Hee-joo on the other end of the line. After speeding up with the kidnapper in the car, she crashed the vehicle and left the would-be kidnapper unconscious – but she took his phone. Hee-joo has seen an opportunity to negotiate her freedom from Sa-eon – mutism be damned, I guess – by forcing him to shell out 2 billion won or set his wife “free”.
What’s the leverage here? Well, Hee-joo knows that Sa-eon was supposed to marry her older sister In-a, but she fled the night before the wedding. It seems like Hee-joo was a consolation prize for a jilted groom, and the nuptials were a complete sham. Now So-eon, who resolves to find the kidnapper, is faced with the possibility of the truth getting out and his silver tongue not being enough to repair the damage.
I told you this was weird.
