Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

The Beauty Inside
(뷰티 인사이드 / Byuti Insaideu)
MyDramaList rating: 6.0/10

Hello everyone! It’s time for a new review~
It took me longer than expected to finish this drama. The episodes were quite long, about 1 hour and 15 minutes each, and although this was part of the reason, it wasn’t the main one. Before this I’ve watched plenty of long-episode dramas. It’s just, for some reason, I had a really hard time concentrating on it. A couple of times I was only able to watch a half episode and finish the rest the next day. And if I was able to finish one episode in one day, it was with a lot of breaks in-between and it ended up taking almost an entire (mid)day. I’ve never really had this before, and it kind of sucked because I was really looking forward to watching this. The main actors are great and the story sounded really interesting and promising, so I guess I had pretty high expectations.

I will try to put into words as well as possible what caused this confusion/distraction for me.
In general I’ve only read really positive comments about this drama, and I may be inclining a little bit to an unpopular opinion here, but hey, as a review writer you have to be brave enough to write your own honest opinions whether they match the mainstream viewer’s opinion or not.

So, okay, The Beauty Inside is a 16-episode drama remake of the 2015 movie with the same name. I actually watched this movie right before I finished the last episode of the drama, to see if there were any similarities or references in the drama that I missed. It turns out, there were. I’m glad I watched the movie, but I feel like I should’ve watched it BEFORE watching the drama, because now I missed out on some references to the movie.
Anyways, the story of the drama is about Han Se Gye (played by Seo Hyun Jin), who is a famous actress with a stellar reputation as well as a troubling one – every once a month, she ‘runs away’ and disappears for at least a whole week.
We find out soon that she has a very strange condition: one week every month, she turns into a different person. Regardless of sex, age, nationality, she literally changes into someone else. In her position as a celebrity, this is of course very inconvenient, especially since she can’t exactly predict when it’s coming. She has a vague schedule, like how women know around what time their period will come (I don’t know why but this seems to be the most logical explanation to me xD), but it still catches her off guard.
The first time this happened was 10 years prior to the start of the story, when she was travelling in Europe with her best friend, now turned manager Yoo Woo Mi (played by Moon Ji In). She woke up one day as a grandmother and panicked so much she ran into the street and almost got hit by a car. A gentleman saved her by pushing her away and getting hit himself. This stranger, as we basically all know from episode 1, is Seo Do Jae (played by Lee Min Gi). The accident damaged his brain and caused him to have prosopagnosia, aka the disability to recognize people’s faces. He is now the Director of his family’s airline company T-Way, of which Se Gye happens to be the main model. The only people who know about his condition are his mother (played by Na Young Hee) and his secretary Jung Joo Hwan (played by Lee Tae Ri). He’s keeping it a secret from the rest of his family and the company since any kind of weakness can be used against him and people may take away his right to inherit the company because he has an ‘illness’.
After Se Gye makes another dramatic getaway (at least she can feel it coming and has time to run away before she changes) and her reputation gets another negative blow, Do Jae has to deal with the reputation of his airline, since she is the face of it. Like, literally, her face is ON the plane.
After some (initially quite hostile) meetings, Se Gye and Do Jae come up with an agreement to help each other out, and they start fake-dating in order to help their respective reputations. During this period, they both find out about each other’s conditions. Se Gye unexpectedly changes when they’re on a plane together, and although Do Jae can’t know for sure, he realizes there’s something different about her. When he doesn’t respond to her changing faces, Se Gye quickly gathers that he’s not able to recognize faces in general and helps him out a couple of times so he doesn’t get busted in a public work situation. While they are fake-dating, inevitably, they fall for each other for real. After a while they decide to break up to the public, so to stop their fake-dating, and then start real-dating in secret.
Besides this main story of their romance, there is also a storyline about Do Jae’s stepsister Kang Sa Ra (played by Lee Da Hee) and Se Gye’s friend Ryu Eun Ho (played by Ahn Jae Hyun). Eun Ho also knows about Se Gye’s condition and is occasionally asked to watch her house and dog for her when she has to go in hiding. His ambition is to be a priest. Sa Ra is constantly trying to one-up her brother and wants to desperately prove she can make it as a Director of her own airline company by herself, as a woman. However, it takes a mental toll on her and she is actually very lonely and acts very coldly to people because she’s not used to other people’s warmth.

Let’s start from the beginning.
From episode 1 on, I found it hard to focus. I don’t know what it was, but I found it a bit difficult to establish the relationships between all the characters. For example, when we first meet Do Jae walking through the airport and meeting a bunch of people, they’re not actually ‘introduced’ to us – when he meets Sa Ra and doesn’t recognize her and she tells him off, we only learn that she must be some sort of relative because she talks about their grandfather. It wasn’t clear to me from the start that she was his sister, let alone stepsister. In Se Gye’s case, besides Woo Mi, her friendship with Eun Ho was also a bit vague, we don’t learn how they became friends or how they met, he’s also younger than them so I really wondered where they could’ve met.
And then the whole fake-dating thing started and that got me even more confused. Honestly, I just couldn’t really focus on their whole agreement, why they decided fake-dating would be the best option to solve their problems. And when they started dating for real, why did they feel the need to ‘break up’ to the public? Was that just to make it clear to themselves? Like, our fake-dating stops here, our real-dating begins here? But then they still appeared in public when they started real-dating, so what was the point? Anyways.

We get a couple of nice cameos in the series, several people that Se Gye turns into. It was nice to have cameos appear in the series, also getting their own little contribution to the story. What I liked about those first couple of episodes was that we really got to see her in that situation, how she was another person for a week. And also how, looking like someone else, she was still able to help other people. In these couple of cases, her changing into someone else actually helped in situations where she couldn’t have done much as Han Se Gye. When helping out a high school girl from being harrassed, it helped that she looked like a high school boy. When they desperately needed a child actor, it helped that she looked like a little boy. And even though lying about receiving the heart of a woman’s child wasn’t all right, it still helped that she was able to give that woman calm and comfort, and she couldn’t have done that if she hadn’t been in the form of a child at the time.
But after those few episodes ended, suddenly it seemed like the writers decided to go a different way, throwing several dramatic events in the mix. That in itself was fine, I mean, it’s a K-Drama; we expect dramatics, but here my main issue with being able to keep up with the series was established. To me, it felt like there was next to no build-up in any of the dramatic events. Things kept happening, and while the main actors were already crying their eyes out, I was still sitting there like, ‘…wait, hold on, what is happening?’ At some point it just stopped making sense to me at all. It wasn’t the actors, and it wasn’t the story in itself, but I just didn’t feel any connection between all the different events in the series. Even the side plots felt like they didn’t really have anything to do with each other, it became very incoherent.

The foremost example being the situation with Se Gye’s mother (played by Kim Hee Jung). She is introduced in one episode and literally in the second half of the next episode, she suddenly has stage 3 cancer and dies, in half an episode. What was that? It was so sudden and, sad to say, random to me that I just couldn’t keep up with the dramatic and I was just confused as to what the hell was going on. In retrospect, it felt like a plot tool to force Se Gye to get close to her mom, and then when she changed while her mom didn’t have much longer to live and she had to bury her mom looking like someone else, it felt as if the plot tool was also to create a situation for Se Gye in which she really hated her condition. Still, couldn’t they have created a different situation, or at least put her mother’s death at the end or something? For me it just really felt like, ‘Oh hi Se Gye’s mom, nice to meet you– oh okay you’re already gone, sadness’. And also the fact that, when she did visit her mom looking like this other woman, and her mom recognized her immediately, like, then what was the whole point of keeping it a secret? They could’ve given her mom more time, build up the relationship between the two throughout the series and create a different kind of situation in which Se Gye would end up telling her the secret. They didn’t have to kill off the mom after 1,5 episodes. That really confused the heck out of me. I still don’t see the necessity of it after finishing the series. What was the additional value of it?

I think the reason for a lot of the weird unclear build-ups was that the intended time jumps were really vague to me. At some point, Se Gye changes into an old man, and she goes in hiding and no one can reach her. Which is kind of weird, because everyone was kind of used to it by now, she never went off the grid so that even her manager couldn’t reach her. So I was wondering why she suddenly decided to be so mysterious and embarrassed about it. This was also the first change in which they didn’t show us her new face, like, they kept it hidden from us. In the end, when it was revealed, I was just like, ‘okay, so? It’s just an old man? Why the dramatic reveal?’ After watching the movie, I realized it must have been a reference to that because that same old man appeared as one of the changes in the movie as well. Anyways, I didn’t get it. And when she was like ‘My face isn’t turning back’, I found it really strange because to me it felt like she’d only changed two days earlier and she was being presumptuous by already complaining she wasn’t changing back.
Some time later, it actually turns out that already more than a week had passed. Okay. Well, if they hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t have gotten that. The time passing between events was really unclear to me, except for the times when it was literally mentioned on screen like ‘1 year later’ or something. So that all just added to my confusion.
And then the dramatics would all in some way, also be debunked. She changed back from the old man to herself after hugging Do Jae and then it was like ‘oh hey, nevermind!’ and I would just be like ‘…okay? You panicked too soon, girl!’
I mean, by then it was already established that the changes were unpredictable as heck.
By the way, can I also mention that I found it pretty extreme that Woo Mi actually got herself into an accident JUST to cover for Se Gye’s schedule while she was away? Like, she’s been dealing with her friend’s disappearances for so long and now suddenly for this one she needed to basically sacrifice herself like that? Even though she made sure she wouldn’t get seriously hurt, she still ended up in the hospital!

Let me just talk about the different characters and their relationships before I go on to some more critical comments.
First of all, Se Gye and Do Jae. I think there is a lot to say about their relationship. Besides my own personal opinion that the build-up in their relationship was a bit vague, of course the main message of the series is conveyed through their bond, as Do Jae accepts Se Gye entirely, no matter what face she wakes up with. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder, realistically, how it was so easy for Do Jae to accept it.
What I liked about the movie was that the woman in Do Jae’s position actually really struggled with getting used to being greeted by a stranger every day. Even though she loved the man very much, she couldn’t get used to it a 100%, which seems like a completely normal way of feeling in this situation. It made it really realistic and painful from both sides.
I feel like in the drama remake, there was very little processing required from Do Jae. He just accepted it like that, and was really quick to start saying things like ‘I don’t care, you will always look beautiful to me’ etcetera. So, in a sense, there was also a certain lack in build-up of their relationship. Their first kiss is in episode 6, which is quite soon for a K-Drama. And then all of a sudden they’re already at this point where they’ve accepted each other so entirely that they’re completely comfortable and warm with each other and everything.
Of course, we know from the first episode that it’s Do Jae who saved her that time when she first changed. So it really was a matter of time before she would find out and there would undoubtedly be some dramatic situation between them. However, as the truth was revealed, I had really hoped for Se Gye to stay as mature about it as she’d been throughout their whole relationship – I really liked how mature they remained, while being completely crazy about each other.
When Se Gye finds out Do Jae was the one who saved her life 10 years ago when she changed for the first time, and that his prosopagnosia was caused by that accident, she went into my personally most hated response mechanism:
‘Oh my God this is all my fault, I ruined his life, he’s like this because of me, I don’t deserve to be with him, I carelessly made comments about his disability before, Oh my god I’m the worst person ever, we have to break up now’.
She didn’t give Do Jae anything to say about it, even though this concerned him as much as her, if not more. He was the one who ended up with a damaged brain, after all, give him a chance to say something! But no, she literally just walks away without explaining anything, then tells him over the phone that he became like that because of her in the vaguest way possible. Even after she tells him in person, Do Jae doesn’t even flinch. Honestly, in this situation, Do Jae was so mature! He was the person who went ‘okay, well, then let’s fix this, let’s get through this together’, but he didn’t get the chance because she had already decided how everything between them should go and she just left.
I quickly jotted down some comments from when I was watching this part and I already saved it to a draft of this blog post in advance (I swear I haven’t done this since my frustration while I was watching About Time). These are some things I would’ve liked to say to Se Gye at that point:
1. Girl. It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask to change, you were panicking for all the reasons in the world because you suddenly woke up in an old lady’s body. You were scared. You didn’t ask for him to push you out of that car’s way. That was all him, because he’s a good person. Don’t put his actions onto yourself.
2. How the hell were you supposed to know that was him? Don’t go feeling all guilty about things you said to him when you didn’t even know and couldn’t possibly have known! Blaming yourself for saying things in oblivion to his personal situation – because he hasn’t told you his personal situation himself – is such a wasteful thing to do. True, you might feel bad about things you’ve said in retrospect, but don’t punish yourself like that because it’s not like you did it on purpose. If you would’ve known, you wouldn’t have said those things, that should be enough. He also didn’t mind, because he knew you didn’t know and that was okay.
3. THIS IS NOT JUST ABOUT YOU. Consider Do Jae’s feelings when he found out. You taking the whole thing on yourself and acting all dramatic? Imagine what HE must feel like. It makes absolutely no sense to shut him out now, he has as much stuff to process as you do in this situation, if not more. Walking away from him, shutting yourself off and then facing him coldly like ‘I did this to you, it’s on me to push you away’, even lying to his face that you don’t love him while that’s obviously such a lame attempt to push him away, hurting his feelings for no reason… NO. Just no. You don’t get to do that. It’s the two of you in this relationship. I was under the impression that your love was already strong enough to face a trial like this. This is the hardest trial you’ll probably face but you’re not even able to get over it by talking it through and facing it together?
Honestly, her reaction pissed me off SO MUCH. Going all crazy panicky, thrashing her pictures, groaning, crying. And all I could do was just sit there like, ‘oh my god girl CHILL’. I get that it was hard, okay, but she could’ve just been straight with him while she was there! She could’ve just sat up straight, face him, and say, ‘Okay, this is going to be really hard for the both of us but it’s also really important. That woman you saved in the accident that caused you this… that was me.’ And they could’ve addressed the issue right away, TOGETHER.
Also, when he came to her house and she told him again, ‘that old lady was me’, SUDDENLY he asked ‘What do you mean? How could that have been you?’ … Like, does this question even need an explanation? She literally just told him over the phone that she turned into that grandma the first time she changed, and that she was in Europe at the time. The way he asked it sounded as if he didn’t even know about her condition. Weird writing.

Also, after she went all dramatic and even RETIRED from the acting industry to sit by herself in a house in the countryside to wallow in self-pity, Do Jae actually went and solved ALL their problems by himself. He literally went to Europe to have a very risky surgery, he took the chance and cured his prosopagnosia. The worst thing: he did it for HER. So SHE wouldn’t have a reason to stay away or feel guilty anymore. He was fine living with his disability, he had gotten used to it, but he took the risk of that surgery for HER. Because SHE had decided it was a problem for them.
And then he went to meet her again and they reunited JUST LIKE THAT, like, ‘oh, now you’re cured we can be together again’. What?! Did that seriously take away all her guilt? If she was gonna be that dramatic, she might have kept it up because she still ‘put him through that disability for 10 years’. But now that she found out it was curable after all, suddenly all was well in the world again? They got back together really quick after that, to the point where I, again, wondered what the whole point of their dramatic break-up had been. They could have literally stayed together, figuring stuff out, and she could have supported him through the surgery. Oh well.

I wish to emphasize that Seo Hyun Jin and Lee Min Gi are two of my favorite actors. They are so great, and their acting in this drama was also great. What bothered me this time was really the writing and the pacing of the story. I’m really sad to say it, because I just want to assume every show they star in is amazing. This just didn’t do it for me, but I want to stress that I have no ill words about the actors, whatsoever.

So all in all, I wasn’t as into the main couple as I have been before in other dramas. One moment it felt like everything was going uncannily smoothly, like they got together pretty fast, and then when everything seemed to be going so well that nothing would ever be able to break them apart, this past event did and it made zero sense to me. Especially because they just made up like the break-up didn’t even happen, after he risked his life for surgery with a dangerously low success rate to come back to her, and she even got mad at him for a moment for risking his life like that. Girl, at that point, you really had no right to be saying that because he did everything for YOU. And she was also not able to live without him, so really, she didn’t have anything to complain about that in that regard.

Let me talk a little about Woo Mi and Eun Ho, Se Gye’s most trusted friends. We learn that Woo Mi has been Se Gye’s best friend for a long time, even before she became an actress. They were travelling in Europe and Woo Mi was the first person to learn about Se Gye’s condition, for some reason she was able to see that the old woman crying in front of her door was Se Gye. Honestly, Woo Mi is the most loyal friend Se Gye could have wished for. Sometimes I also felt like Se Gye was taking her a bit for granted. I mean, of course, she didn’t ask her to put herself through a fake accident just to distract the press from the fact that Se Gye hadn’t shown up for an interview or something, but when Do Jae asked Se Gye about her relationship with Woo Mi, she was weirdly casual about it. She was just like, ‘oh well, you know, we get along, and we’ll always get along’. I don’t know, I thought she’d say something a little deeper than that, since their friendship certainly looked deeper than that to me. Woo Mi isn’t just her manager, she is her friend, she cares and worries about Se Gye constantly, and Se Gye most of the time doesn’t even explain things to her. When she turns into that old man and doesn’t change back soon enough and goes into hiding, she doesn’t even call Woo Mi to give an update. When she finds out about her past connection with Do Jae and goes all emotional, she doesn’t even tell Woo Mi what happened, she just casually says ‘hm, maybe I should retire as an actress’. Like, what? Of all people, Woo Mi should’ve been the first person to know about these things! She really should’ve confided in her more. But Woo Mi was really too nice, even when Se Gye wouldn’t tell her, she would just be like ‘well, I guess you have your reasons’.
I was so glad when Se Gye finally told her about the thing and Woo Mi was like, ‘Get your act together!’, haha, she acted exactly as I would have.

In any case, it was clear how close they were, and that we got a flashback to see how far they’d come together. How exactly Woo Mi managed to become Se Gye’s manager, where they got the money from that, is a potential hole, but it didn’t really distract from the story. I think in their case it was most important to know that they were close friends.

Eun Ho, on the other hand, is another story. I kept feeling weird about it for some reason. Like, okay, we see a flashback where he visited them and then happened to find out about Se Gye’s condition, but other than that I have no clue how they became friends. If they knew each other from way back it would make sense that they also knew Eun Ho’s family, but he also seemed to be some years younger than Se Gye and Woo Mi. He was still living at home with his parents and younger sister.
The whole thing with Eun Ho was that he had this dream since forever that he wanted to help people, and this had resulted in an ambition to become a priest, of all things. His mother is against it, but eventually accepts it.

Just to say, I love Ahn Jae Hyun to bits. I really do, but his character was so ambiguous to me! His storyline really didn’t have anything to do with Se Gye and her condition, really, whenever I was watching scenes with him and his family it felt like I was watching a different series.

Moving on to his relationship with Sa Ra. This was probably one of the most random pair-ups I’ve seen between second leads in a K-Drama. Mostly because they weren’t even really second leads. They were in some way related to the first leads, but other than that their lives stood completely apart from theirs.
In one of the first episodes, when Se Gye wants to be alone with Do Jae to talk about their secrets, she sends Eun Ho to Sa Ra to distract her, since the latter was being nosy about her and Do Jae’s real relationship.
After doing so, Eun Ho and Sa Ra run into each other a couple of times, and it really does look like Eun Ho is following her for some reason. Their encounters are just too coincidental. So, naturally at one point, Sa Ra begins to suspect he is into her. When he tells her this is not the case, that he’s nice to everyone and that he wants to become a priest, she is thrown off guard so much she actually becomes more interested in him.
After she tells him she thinks she has feelings for him, she then sways him as well and he starts doubting his ambitions for priesthood, even though that has been his dream for forever. And then he ends up giving up his dream because Sa Ra becomes ‘his new dream’ and he feels like she needs him because she’s so frail and lonely by herself. Or something.
Anyway, my main issue with this was that it felt like they shoved two completely unrelated characters to each other and invented a mysterious bond between them. Honestly, in the end, Sa Ra treated him like a puppy, or even how she might treat her only child, asking for kisses on the cheek before he left the car. Like, I get that he was younger, but she didn’t have to keep treating him like that. She really went all Noona Girlfriend on him, showing off that she was older and wealthier by giving him expensive gifts. She even dragged him with her to his parents and asked them if she could have him without even notifying him, really as if she owned him. I don’t know, it felt a little off to me.
I never really felt a genuine chemistry between them, also because, again, I missed a real natural build-up in their relationship. What was confusing for me was that I first thought Eun Ho was interested in her, then he said he wasn’t and then I was like ‘okay, guess not’, and then he still became interested in her, haha! I honestly couldn’t keep up with anything that happened in this drama!

I have seen one drama before with Lee Da Hee, I Hear Your Voice, which is an absolute diamond!! One of the best dramas I’ve ever seen. (There is a Chinese remake of it called ‘No Secrets’ and I really want to see it but I’m also scared to be disappointed haha #dramaaddictstruggles.) I saw her recently when I watched the shows Queendom and Road to Kingdom, where she was one of the hosts. I didn’t know she was in this series, but it was nice to see her act again.
As for her character, I think she was one of the most layered ones. We get to see different sides of her, and we get to understand how much she’s holding back and how frustrated that makes her. The scene where she was having a meeting with a bunch of old men who all started to verbally sexualize her was really hard to watch. There were more of these cases, and it was clear how much she struggled with it, since she basically kept letting it slide for the sake of her company. When Do Jae got himself involved and put those guys in their place, I would’ve liked to see her do that herself, to be honest. It was nice to see how she called one of the scumbag directors to tell him herself as well, but it would have been more impressive if she’d kicked their butts by herself from the start.
I think she showed more layers than Se Gye, to be honest, which is really ironic since Se Gye literally lives someone else’s life every month. Despite this, I still felt like Sa Ra could’ve had more character development. She still stayed pretty much the same, except opening up a little more to Eun Ho and her brother and their friends in the end.
It was just that her relationship with Eun Ho felt a bit forced, as if they were determined to put two people together besides the main couple, but otherwise they really didn’t have any connection with each other whatsoever.

What really struck me in the beginning was that the relations in Do Jae’s family were quite interesting. At first I really didn’t think they were that close at all, but it was nice to see them grow toward each other a little bit more.
So you have Do Jae, his grandfather, his mother, his stepfather and Sa Ra. You don’t really get to know each of them all that well. I guess it was difficult for Do Jae and Sa Ra to both feel at ease in their newly assembled family, especially since Sa Ra has a different father. Especially since in the beginning there was a lot of sibling rivalry and Sa Ra also didn’t really warm up to Se Gye or anything.
I was kind of surprised because I really didn’t think in the beginning that his mom knew about his condition. Like, you just kept seeing her get upset when he didn’t recognize her, but I didn’t immediately get that she knew why that was. Also, in the beginning she seemed to be quite the icy woman, also disapproving of his relationship with Se Gye at first. It was kind of funny that she started to warm up to Se Gye after starting to think Do Jae might be gay, since she caught a guy in his bed once – of course, this was Se Gye who had just conveniently changed when his mom had come over, haha. After that she was suddenly the most welcoming mother-in-law ever!
His grandfather was the typical grumpy but goodhearted guy who scolded him a lot and called him a fool but actually liked his grandson very much. I sometimes found this guy’s acting a little too much, I have to admit. As if he could only make groaning and scoffing sounds. But I did like it when he turned up at that meeting when the bad director was trying to take over the company from Do Jae and grandpa dissed him in front of everyone.
I didn’t really get any kind of impression of Do Jae’s stepfather, he didn’t really appear that much but he seemed to be a bit of a pacifist between the other family members.

All in all, I actually didn’t really get why Do Jae had to keep his prosopagnosia a secret for everyone. I mean, there was a legit reason for it, he once had an accident. It’s not a life-threatening disease, it’s simply a visual inconvenience, but that doesn’t mean he can’t run a company. He can just have his assistant or anyone else help him out. I really hated that he didn’t dare come out with this news because those predatory other directors would use it against him and make everyone believe that he would be unfit as a Director. When that bad director found out, he literally was like ‘highlight this as an illness’, and then I was just like, Not on my watch, sir! Luckily they failed in that plan, and I thought it was very good of Do Jae to eventually tell everyone in his family AND even his team at work. There really was no use hiding it, especially compared to Se Gye’s uncommon condition which would be “slightly” harder to explain.

One more person before I go on to some more general comments: Chae Yoo Ri (played by Ryu Hwa Young). She was a fellow actress and pretty much Se Gye’s nemesis, even though everyone agreed that she wasn’t as good an actress as Se Gye. Anyway, Yoo Ri and Se Gye where always trying to outdo each other. At some point, Yoo Ri starts to get suspicious about Se Gye’s behavior and very nearly witnesses her change into someone else. When she tries to find a lead and sends someone after her, Se Gye busts her and pretty much threatens her. In this moment, I actually found Se Gye pretty mean. She didn’t have to go that far, even if it was a joke. She knew how petty it was what Yoo Ri was trying to do and she should’ve treated it as such. Instead, in the last episode, we see Yoo Ri traumatized for life, running away from everyone, scared someone would come for her… it was almost kind of comical but I found it a bit over the top. Was this really what became of her after Se Gye’s threat? If so, it was a bit exaggerated.

I actually really like Ryu Hwa Young, haha. I loved her in Age of Youth. So I couldn’t dislike Yoo Ri, for some reason. Yes, she was petty, but she was also trying to make her way in the world and she was just too aware of Se Gye. She should have left her alone and try to make her own path, but she kept trying to one-up Se Gye, and that’s what brought her down in the end. Still, I don’t believe she was truly evil, just not so smart ^^”

I can’t help but make a few comparisons to the movie here. Going into the movie thinking that the drama series was a remake of it, I was very surprised to find out that the two versions have almost nothing in common. The only thing they have in common is that the main character changes into other people. In the movie, it’s a man and he changes into a different person every day, which is even more exhausting. Also, it appeared that he only changed whenever he fell asleep – as he was able to stay the same person for three days because he kept himself awake. The woman he falls in love with has no condition whatsoever, and when she finds out about him, she accepts him as warmly as possible. However, as I mentioned before, she can’t get used to the fact that he appears as a stranger before her every single day. There’s also a mentioning of this, she tells him ‘you have to get used to it every day, whenever you wake up as a new person you need to figure out who you are, but I have to go through that as well’. In the end, he breaks up with her because he sees she’s neglecting her health because she’s so stressed out and tired. She still goes back to him in the end, she finds him again. The final scene is the only scene that corresponded with the drama remake, when Se Gye walks towards Do Jae and while she’s walking you see fragments of all kinds of different people.
What I loved the MOST about the movie was the fragments kept going while he kissed her, so it actually showed her kissing various versions of him, even women. I was really surprised they chose to show that, since same-sex sceneries are usually avoided. They didn’t do that part in the drama, but they did show several people walking up to Do Jae, mostly cameos from people from Another Oh Hae Young, haha.
Also, in the movie it’s revealed at the end that the man’s condition was actually hereditary; his father had it too and it’s the reason his father left them. I still feel like I would’ve liked some sort of explanation about Se Gye’s condition, even if it was something in her DNA or whatever, because it was such a big thing to happen for no reason at all.
Oh, and the whole thing with the man/Se Gye ending her cycles with ‘That’s it for today’ (or something along those lines) also corresponded between the movie and the drama.

Overall, I think the movie conveyed the message of the story much better than the drama. At the end of the movie I really felt like she accepted him completely, and this was I guess also shown in the final sequence where she was shown also kissing him as a woman, without judgement. I still felt like in the drama they stayed a little on the conservative side with this. Especially since they made Se Gye a beautiful woman and famous actress. I didn’t really get the feeling that Do Jae would kiss her if she didn’t look like her real self. I would’ve like to see it happen, haha.

I would like to say something about some specific parts of the series, like scenes and cameos that stood out to me.

First of all, while I liked it that Se Gye kept record of all the people she had been, that she photographed herself before she changed back and made a little movie of all of them, at some point I felt like that disappeared as she started changing more irregularly. For example, she changed back from her child appearance when she was in a car, same as the old man. When she was a middle-aged woman on her mother’s funeral, she literally changed as she was standing in the public bathroom where anyone could have walked in at that moment (quite risky). So she had no way of knowing she would suddenly turn back. And still, at the end, we see a portrait picture of that woman, as if she had still made a picture of herself looking like that. But… is that right? With her, and with the old man, when she changed back I was like ‘Ahh now she didn’t get to take a picture of herself looking like them!’ but … she still took the pictures? Okay, well, anyways, haha. In general I thought she could’ve been more careful, since she’d been going through this for 10 years and it still caught her off guard. Whenever she had a premonition or a feeling that it would come soon, she would still go out, instead of staying home. Lots of times she would be surrounded by people in a situation that was really awkward to suddenly run away from, when it happened. So that was a bit weird in itself, that she also never seemed to take any precautions in case it happened when she wouldn’t expect it – which is, basically, every single time.

There was this one flashback scene of Do Jae’s doctor talking to him and his mother after the accident, and this scene was so weird? Like, he opens with ‘We have a possible cure’, giving everyone hope, then it all went down from there. ‘Oh, no but actually it’s not a guaranteed success at all, it only has a success rate of 5% and you might actually die.’ Like, seriously doctor? You’ve got some nerve opening with the sentence ‘WE HAVE A CURE’ and then ‘BUT ACTUALLY WE DON’T’. This scene didn’t make any sense to me, writing-wise. ‘If you want to take a chance on this hope’ dude what hope? This isn’t hope, this is a 5% success rate. Pff. And then he still survived the surgery and again, I was like, then what was the whole ominous prelude for? You made me scared for nothing! I’ll keep saying this in every review, but Moon Woo Jin is the next generation superstar. This boy was NINE years old at the time of The Beauty Inside and he was PHENOMENAL. This boy, now twelve, is seriously one of the most talented child actors out there. I can’t wait to see him grow up through K-Dramas and eventually become his own male lead!!

I liked that they were watching The Third Charm in the series, haha. If you follow my reviews chronologically, you’ll know I watched that before this, so it was perfect! Se Gye was watching an episode of it on television and I was like ‘Hey!! I remember this!!’
Also, this series has officially gotten me hooked on the artist Rothy, her OST song ‘Cloud’ for this was basically on repeat the entire time, but I never tired of it. I knew one more song from her from the Romance is a Bonus Book OST, but thanks to this song I looked her up and I really like her style of music, haha. So a bonus point for the OST!

I feel like this has become a review that’s as incoherent as the series was for me. Seriously, I expected to finish this review within an hour or something, but it’s taking me so much time for some reason! I still feel like I’m forgetting stuff to mention. I haven’t said anything about Kingkang, her dog, but what can I say? It’s super cute.
I also feel like I haven’t said much about Do Jae’s assistant Joo Hwan, while he was supporting role, but that’s because there really wasn’t a lot of interesting things going on with his character. I don’t really know what to say about him except that it was occasionally funny. He really liked money, but I still think he was very loyal to Do Jae.
Honestly, Woo Mi and Joo Hwan had such a hard time dealing with whatever Do Jae and Se Gye were doing, they deserve more credit!

I think it’s time to close it off. I will probably get back to this review sometime and make it a bit more coherent, but I’m simply too tired now, haha. I want to get on with my list!
The actors were great, the storyline had a lot of potential, but I feel like they didn’t really know how to make this remake into something special that would still be a thing standing on itself besides the movie it’s based on. They made some interesting choices: to give this ability to a famous celebrity who is almost constantly watched by the media and already has a reputation to uphold, plus they gave Do Jae a disability of his own. Not sure what, in the end, this established together. If they hadn’t given Do Jae any disability, like the woman in the movie, it could’ve also been an interesting story, and more simple. But I guess they also wanted Do Jae to be someone with a ‘condition’ that he someone needed fully accept him for. In the end, it didn’t really make as big an impression as Se Gye’s condition, since in his case, he just came out with it and that was that. I also felt that the last episode wasn’t even really necessary. It felt like they’d already wrapped up everything they needed in episode 15 and the final episode was just kind of a filler to give more screentime to how happily everyone ended up together. Also, that final revelation that Se Gye had when she helped this old woman across the street and this somehow spurred a philosophical inner monologue in her? I didn’t really get that.

While it also dealt with good themes like prejudices, sexual harassment and the limited amount of privacy that celebrities have (I still get nauseous at scenes where people on the street see a famous person and feel that it’s alright to swarm to them and push their phones in the person’s face while they look obviously distressed), but I feel like they could’ve done more with Se Gye’s identity crisis. Besides the wardrobe full of clothes for every possible size and gender, we didn’t really get to see her take any interest in the people she became. She took their pictures, but she didn’t take any voluntary action. Usually she’d just sit in front of the TV with her dog until she changed back. I feel like the guy in the movie put way more effort in figuring out who he woke up as. It really felt like for Se Gye, it was more of a burden, and that was because she was made to be a celebrity in this version.
Let’s just say that, in general, I didn’t really get this series, haha. It started off pretty interesting, and after that it was just a domino of confusion. Again, I don’t think it was the actors at all, they did a great job, but the pacing was just really weird and the writing at times not so strong.
I will still watch stuff with Seo Hyun Jin and Lee Min Gi since they are still amazing actors and I’m still convinced they’ll do a lot more great stuff in the future!

Thank you for sticking through reading this lenghty review, I hope I was able to convey my confusion well enough. Next up is another series from 2018 that I’ve really been looking forward to, so you’ll see my next review soon!

Bye-bee~ ^^