SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Move to Heaven
(무브 투 헤븐: 나는 유품정리사입니다 / Mubeu Tu Hebeun: Naneun Yupumjeongnisaimnida/Move to Heaven: I am a Trauma Cleaner)
MyDramaList rating: 8.0/10

Hi everyone! Back again just within October with another review. This drama wasn’t originally on my watch list, but my friend recommended it to me after she’d binged it in two days and after hearing her reaction to it I became curious and I decided to watch it in-between my watch list items. And I’m really glad I did. In the midst of everyone going crazy about Squid Game, I was busy discovering this precious gem! It really is a hidden jewel, it’s short but so strong in message and greatly acted, so I would really recommend it to anyone who is interested in series with serious themes like loss and healing, and stories that are slightly slower paced.
I will give more reactions later on, let me first start with a short summary before I go on to discuss some of the themes and messages that I feel were important in this series. And after that, as usual, I will make some cast comments and conclude my final thoughts.

Move to Heaven is a 10-episode Netflix K-Drama, each episode around 53 minutes long, so not as long as the usual Netflix K-Drama. It’s about a 20-year old boy with Asperger’s named Han Geu Roo (played by Tang Joon Sang), who helps his father, Han Jeong Woo (played by Ji Jin Hee) with his trauma cleaning service, Move to Heaven. Trauma cleaning involves cleaning up the rooms and final belongings of people who have recently passed away. Jung Woo has raised Geu Roo by himself since his wife died when Geu Roo was still young, and it has been the two of them ever since. When Jung Woo unexpectedly passes away due to a heart failure (it turns out he was sick for a while but never told Geu Roo because he didn’t want to worry him), Geu Roo suddenly finds himself alone and stuck in how to continue. With his guardian gone, his father’s lawyer Oh Hyun Chang (played by Im Won Hee), brings in Geu Roo’s uncle, Jung Woo’s half-brother, Cho Sang Goo (played by Lee Je Hoon). Sang Goo initially doesn’t care about his nephew, his main objective for this 3-month ‘job’ is to get his hands on the house. He doesn’t seem to have any lingering sentimentalities towards his brother and he just finds Geu Roo and his behavior weird and unsettling. Since Geu Roo won’t let him sleep in his father’s room, he’s forced to set up a tent in the living room. He’s a messy person with a seemingly small sense of responsibility towards anything or anyone. And then to finalize their band, there’s Yoon Na Moo (played by Hong Seung Hee), Geu Roo’s neighbor and best friend who is constantly worried about him. When Sang Goo is assigned as his new guardian, she immediately decides to stay with her friend to make sure his weird uncle doesn’t hurt him. Eventually, the three of them continue the work for Move to Heaven together, and Sang Goo slowly but surely comes to terms with his new responsibility, especially after he is faced with some lingering resentment towards Jung Woo. Geu Roo in the end will have to let his father go, as he initially refuses to return his father’s ashes to the burial service.
In-between these uncomfortable new changes in both Geu Roo and Sang Goo’s worlds, several cases in their Move to Heaven will help them get their own closure and in the process, they will grow closer to each other, in their own unique ways.

I just want to say right off the bat that this series draws a beautiful portrait of humanity, of how people can react differently to loss and how they choose to process it. While cleaning up these rooms, Geu Roo collects several valued belongings from the deceased and puts these in a special yellow box in order to give them to someone, as a memento of the deceased. The simple but beautiful determination of Geu Roo is that he can’t have peace before he delivers the yellow box to someone, even if people refuse to accept it. Like the deceased themselves, Geu Roo needs to find a place for their final belongings and memories, before he can move on. Every single case depicted in the series is meaningful, everything has a purpose, and sometimes something about a case even leads to something that has to do with Geu Roo or Sang Goo’s own troubles. I think they really did a great job balancing the Move to Heaven cases next to the main characters’ own storylines and character development. In the beginning, we aren’t given too much information about how Geu Roo has lived all these years with his father, or what Sang Goo’s relationship with Jung Woo exactly was, except that he doesn’t seem to be very fond of him. But all these things are explained, eventually, without taking the attention away from the important messages that the Move to Heaven cases hold. To balance these two important storylines equally at the same time without one of them becoming less important or interesting, that seems pretty challenging but they really pulled it off very well.

You might think after seeing the ‘trauma cleaning’ aspect of the story that the series will be very heavy and emotional, it also made me think of the Japanese movie ‘Okuribito’ (‘Departures’) at first, but in the end I feel like this series mostly focusses on themes like ‘hope’ and ‘healing’ than really on ‘death’. Of course, for each case, we see how the person passes away, or at least what the main cause of their death is, before we move on to the next day, when the body has already been removed, and all that’s left is their room with all their personal stuff left in it. In some cases, the room is the place the person died in, but in other cases not. Still, since it’s their personal space that they left behind, Geu Roo and his father always made sure to, before they started cleaning, address the deceased respectfully. They always announce that they are trauma cleaners from Move to Heaven, and that they will help the deceased with their final move (to heaven). Despite the fact that every episode is emotional in a way, because all the stories are touching and heartbreaking (I’ve been reduced to a puddle of tears multiple times), it always ends in a hopeful tone. The belongings will find their way to a certain someone, they succeed in reminding relatives of the deceased of their attachment to them, etcetera. But it is mainly Geu Roo’s determination to keep doing the work, also as a legacy to his father, that is so touching.

Let me talk a bit about the main characters in more detail. There really aren’t that many characters in this series, besides the main characters there are some minor characters that they meet during one or more of the cases, and then there are the ‘clients’ of Move to Heaven and their stories.
As I mentioned, Han Geu Roo is a 20-year old boy with Asperger’s. Some of his quirks include that everything needs to proceed in an orderly manner for his mind, he can’t handle change very well, he doesn’t look people directly in the eye when he speaks, he listens to classical music while he works, he has a photographic memory, and he LOVES the aquarium. Whenever he’s stressed, he starts repeating all kinds of different rays and sharks and other fish to himself to calm himself down. He often visits the local aquarium to look at all the fish and has even helped out the staff by pointing out that some fish are sick or need to be moved. Really, ever since he was a kid, he’s loved the fish, and he even has a mobile of fish above his bed. He has been eating the same kind of breakfast his father prepared for him for so long that even after he passes, he still makes the table for his dad and doesn’t let his uncle sit in his seat. He can’t eat broken egg yolk, and he doesn’t like to be touched. His father was only allowed to hug him on specific occasions, but even then, Geu Roo is not comfortable with it. In the beginning of the first episode, after seeing how used Geu Roo is to his father being around to take the lead, as soon as Jung Woo dies, you can’t help but immediately worry about him. ‘Who’s going to take care of him now?’ ‘What’s going to happen to him now?’ We immediately feel like he won’t be able to take care properly of himself, even though he seems to be doing pretty great even as Sang Goo enters the house and turns out to be completely useless in taking care of the household. Even though the Move to Heaven seem to distract him from fully processing his father’s death, Geu Roo really is not able to let him go until the final episode. His dedication to his father’s memory, his father who was all he had after he had to watch his mom fade away due to terminal cancer, becomes even more touching when we find out that Geu Roo was actually adopted. Jung Woo, who used to be a firefighter, found him abandoned as a premature baby, severely hypothermic, in a desolated water tank in mid-winter. After making sure the baby was sent to a hospital and recovered, he and his wife got so attached to him that they ended up adopting him as their own son. Geu Roo, at some point, has become aware of this, he knows that he has been adopted but is still able to distinguish that Jung Woo, although he wasn’t his biological father, was really his father who loved him very much.

Cho Sang Goo is Han Jung Woo’s younger half brother, from a different father. His father was extremely abusive to their mother, and although Jung Woo promised to save Sang Goo, he didn’t show up when they’d agreed to meet to run away, leaving Sang Goo to fend for himself. Sang Goo went on the wrong path, and ended up fighting illegally in a gambling den. Even after he officially stopped fighting, the lady who took him in, Madam Jung (played by Jung Ae Yoon) has been blackmailing him into fighting again. The reason he stopped fighting was that he was forced to fight a young boy who he’d trained himself to be a boxer, and knocked him into a coma. About halfway throughout the series, the comatose boy dies, and Sang Goo takes to cleaning up his belongings by himself, stricken with grief and guilt. Besides that, he also finds out the real reason what happened to his brother why he didn’t show up that time when they would run away together, and he discovers that Jung Woo has actually been looking for him for a long time. Gradually finding closure for his personal issues, Sang Goo grows as a person and also starts to become a more caring guardian for Geu Roo. In his final evaluation talk with Lawyer Oh, he hears that Geu Roo has asked for him to remain his formal guardian and that brings tears to his eyes as he accepts.

Yoon Na Moo has been Geu Roo’s only close friend ever since he and his father moved into their street and it is revealed in the end that she has also had a crush on him since she first saw him. Her parents own a food stand next to their house and her mother in particular (played by Jung Young Joo) doesn’t really like her daughter hanging out with Geu Roo so much, and she’s definitely against it when her daughter declares she wants to start working at Move to Heaven for real. Her father (played by Jung Seok Yong) is more easy going than his wife and occasionally covers for his daughter when she sneaks out. Na Moo is the most loyal friend that Geu Roo could wish for. She constantly worries for him, she checks up on him, she hangs out with him. She works parttime at the aquarium Geu Roo frequents and checks up on the fish in the tanks for him. As suspicious as she is of Sang Goo, she keeps tabs on him as well, spotting him leaving the house in the middle of the night, and even following him one time to the gambling den where she sees him fight. Her prior concern lies with Geu Roo, so she’s immediately worried that he’s a violent criminal, but as she joins them on cases for Move to Heaven and gets to know Sang Goo better (mostly through bickering), she finds that he might not be such a bad person after all. Na Moo is probably the person with the least background information of the three main characters, but that didn’t bother me. It was refreshing that at least she could just be the loyal friend without too much baggage herself, who just cared about Geu Roo’s wellbeing more than anyone.

I want to go through the cases one by one very shortly, especially the ones that had some lead or reference that reflected onto the main characters’ personal lives and troubles.
The first case depicted in the first episode, the last one Geu Roo executes with his father, involves a young man who got hurt in a construction accident at work. He was urged by his superiors to go check on this error and got hurt but was forced to hide his injury – later revealed infection – as he wasn’t allowed to take days off or slack off from work. As they go to deliver his final belongings to his parents at his funeral, they discover that both his parents are deaf. His work superiors are making lightly of his death, denying any kind of involvement and just give the mother an envelop of consolation money while behind her back they’re talking about how convenient it is that they can’t hear what they’re saying. Hearing this, Jung Woo can’t stay still and starts reporting the whole situation to the young man’s mother, who in turn scolds the work superiors severely in sign language, as Jung Woo translates. In the final episode, we see that Jung Woo initially learned sign language because Geu Roo initially wouldn’t speak as a child after they adopted him, but did pick up sign language signs very fast and it was their first way of communicating. (The first time Geu Roo spoke was when the three of them first visited the aquarium and Geu Roo became so excited he started naming all the fish and this was such a beautiful moment that I had to mention it.) Anyways, after finishing this case, Jung Woo leaves Geu Roo at the funeral hall with the small fish tank there to take care of something outside, but he never returns as on the way back he suffers a heart attack.
The second case involves an old lady who was found about three weeks after she passed, leaving a big mess in her room due to her body’s decay. Her son and his wife only seem to be interested in her money and they urge Geu Roo to clean up as soon as possible and bring them any cash he finds. As this is Sang Goo’s first mission to assist Geu Roo in this ‘weird and disturbing work’, he is immediately disgusted by the relatives’ behavior towards their deceased mother. In the end, as they discover that the lady had been saving up to buy her son a nice suit as she promised him a long time ago, they manage to persuade her son to listen to the story and he ends up accepting the box with her belongings. In this episode, I was so shocked to see how some people are so self-involved that they would only care about material mementos than that their family member has died. It was probably the toughest case to persuade someone to take the yellow box, but these were two very touching episodes.
The third case involves a woman who was murdered by her stalker and how this man was brought to justice. Through this case, Geu Roo meets the prosecutor for this murder case and she appears to help him out once more in the final episode when they take down the gambling den. This case creates a lead to Sang Goo’s own past of domestic violence, also as he runs into a woman on the streets that’s clearly trying to run from her abusive partner several times before he decides to take action.
The fourth case involves a promising doctor who was fatally injured during a hostage situation in his hospital, and his regrets to have walked away from the love of this life because he was too concerned for their future. I was SO glad to finally see an unmasked portrayal of a homosexual relationship in a K-Drama. True, there was no kissing, but there was definitely intimacy in hand holding and skinship that wasn’t censored or anything, so I think that’s a big step.
The fifth case (one of my major crying episodes) involves an elderly couple who decided to leave this world together and called Move to Heaven in advance for their own case. The wife had been hospitalized for a long time and the husband, despite his age, was still accepting chores from ungrateful snobby people after he had been forced to leave his longtime job at a construction agency. It was heartbreaking to see how this old man (played by Jung Dong Hwan by the way) kept smiling through the shit that other people threw at him and how there seemed to be literally no one who cared enough about him to accept his final belongings. There was one little girl who cared about him, and there was this flashback where she brought him an airconditioner that she and her classmate had been saving money for. They bought it especially for him to keep cool during the hot summer, but when she wanted to give it to him, some nosy neighbor guy butted in and started telling her off! He was like ‘you can’t just give that kind of thing to him, how is he going to pay for the electricity bills’ etcetera and I was like ??? HOW ABOUT YOU MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS SIR? But yeah, this episode really showed how ungrateful some people could be. I was really glad that in the end, one manager from the construction company recognized him as someone who’d been there even when he’d started out himself and all these company’s employees came to pay him their last respects. In this case, they meet social worker Son Woo Rim (played by Choi Soo Young/ Girls’ Generation’s Sooyoung) for the first time. She’s put in charge of cases in which the deceased don’t have any other family (left).
The following two episodes were mainly dedicated to Sang Goo’s past. We see the whole story about his past with domestic violence and also how he discovers that Jung Woo was involved in a major department store collapse on the day they were supposed to run away.
The final case we are shown is one of a American-Korean man who was adopted overseas as a baby and set out to find his birth mother back in Korea based on one photograph, which ends in a heartbreaking misunderstanding. The main purpose for this case is established when we find out Geu Roo was also adopted and, if it weren’t for Jung Woo and his wife, would also have been sent overseas for adoption. This case means a lot to Geu Roo since he recognizes that he would have been the same as this person if it weren’t for his adoptive parents. Social worker Son Woo Rim appears in this episode as well.
The final episode is for Geu Roo to come to terms with his father’s passing as he’s asked to return Jung Woo’s ashes. He fully comes to terms with the fact that even though both his parents aren’t physically around anymore, he still carries them with him in his heart and he can still see them when he wants, since he has precious memories of them. Admittedly, this episode made me bawl like a baby as I watched Geu Roo slowly get his own closure and is finally able to clean up his father’s room by himself.
The series ends with Geu Roo being visited by a mysterious young girl his age who asks for her own service, as she claims she is going to die soon.
Now, as shocking as this final new potential case is, we see that Geu Roo is immediately very taken with this girl, maybe even in an unconsciously romantic way from the way he stares right at her all wide-eyed and flustered. But I did find it quite odd to end the series with this, and so I really hope the rumors about a second season are true. If this would be the case, I would also really be interested to see social worker Son Woo Rim again, as it was clear that there may have been something budding between her and Sang Goo as well.

I would like to make some cast comments now.
First of all, I need to establish that Tang Joon Sang is, and if he already isn’t should be, a national treasure. I was already doting on him as the youngest member of the squad in Crash Landing on You, but now that he’s getting more main roles in series I am just so proud of him. My friend also watched Racket Boys and she is convinced that he’s going to be the next generation top actor because he’s so good. I really, really loved his performance in Move to Heaven. What an incredibly challenging role it must have been for him. In some cases, I’ve tended to get a little annoyed by characters with Asperger’s, mainly because I would just not be able to deal with some of their behavior, even though of course I know they can’t help it, but in this case, I had to keep reminding myself not to hug him through my screen because he wouldn’t like that. xD What an incredibly vulnerable but determined character he created. I cannot believe how, in the last episode, he managed to be so emotionally devastated and still didn’t produce a single tear. He was able to portray all these emotions through his face as Geu Roo, without even crying or smiling widely, you could still see ‘Ah, Geu Roo is happy/satisfied’, ‘Ah, Geu Roo is sad/worried now’. Just like how he has to learn how to read other people’s emotions, we get to learn his and that was really endearing. The way he finally came to terms with his father’s (and also, still, his mother’s) death was both heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time. I couldn’t help but root for him and care about him just like Na Moo did. A really good performance, overall.

I’ve only seen Lee Je Hoon before in Tomorrow With You (which is also REALLY good by the way), but there are some other series of his on my to watch list and I can’t wait. I think he’s a really good actor and very fun to watch. The physical transformation he went through to give the first strong impression of Sang Goo as he entered Geu Roo’s house for the first was very impactful. He actually pulled the scruffy look off very while in my opinion! It was fun but also touching to see his character transform and even though he seemed like a jerk from the start, I immediately felt like that was probably just a mask and that he’d have a really tiny heart. He ultimately does allow himself to get touched by the stories they encounter during their Move to Heaven work, and as he realizes how much he starts to care for his nephew. The dynamic between him and Geu Roo was really enjoyable to watch as well.

I hadn’t seen anything with Hong Seung Hee before, but for some reason she gives me Go Ah Ra vibes? I think she was casted very well for the role of energetic and gutsy Na Moo. I love how selfless all her actions were, like she even cared more about Geu Roo than about herself, not thinking twice to follow Sang Goo to a dangerous gambling den at night with no protection whatsoever. When it was revealed that she liked Geu Roo romantically, which didn’t come as that big of a surprise but still, I still liked how he respected Geu Roo’s feelings and took her distance, like she had already made peace with the fact that he would probably never accept her romantically but she could at least stay by his side as his friend. I can’t help wondering though, if they indeed make a second season and the butterfly girl becomes a potential romantic interest, how Na Moo will respond to that. I found it a pretty unexpected turn of events when the new girl was introduced right after even Na Moo’s father mentioned that he believe Na Moo and Geu Roo had been meant for each other from the start, also since their names apparently have similar meanings.
Anyways, I liked her character. I feel like some people might find her a bit annoying because of her nosiness, but she did it for all the good reasons and it was clear that she had nothing but good intentions in her heart, so it didn’t bother me at all.

I have seen Ji Jin Hee before as the bad guy in Blood, but from the moment he appeared in Move to Heaven I knew I would love him. He was the best man, the best father to Geu Roo you could imagine. Of course, halfway through the first episode, I had this feeling that something was going to happen to him, as K-Dramas go. But I’m glad he didn’t disappear after his character passed, he still appeared reguarly, first in flashbacks but then in the final episode also as Geu Roo’s memory of him. It really seemed like he wasn’t completely gone throughout the series, and that matched so well with what he told Geu Roo to remember: that the people we love who die never completely disappear, because at least one person still alive will remember them and keep their memory alive, either in their mind or their heart or both. He was such a selfless, amazingly sweet father character and I really enjoyed his performance.

Furthermore, it was nice seeing Im Won Hee again, I feel like it’s been a really long time since I last saw a drama with him and he always has more comical roles so it was also good to see him in a serious role. Although I did crack up whenever he almost choked on his tea whenever someone entered his office unannounced. xD

And it was funny to see Choi Soo Young after I’d just finished Run On in which she was one of the female leads. Her character as the social worker was so different from her character in Run On that I was kind of impressed with her versatile acting skills. Apparently she’s signed with an acting agency, so I hope to see more of her in the future! I know I have at least one other series with her on my watch list. 🙂 She was a really human, genuine character who sincerely cared about the people under her care, and also didn’t shy away to show how involved she was in their cases. If there will be a second season of this series, I would like to see her again as well, maybe she and Sang Goo can become a cute couple or something, haha.

All in all, I really enjoyed this series. It was beautifully written and with great acting. I literally don’t have anything that I didn’t like about it or found peculiar or confusing, except for the open ending I guess, but I just hope that that means we’ll get a second season! I think this is really a hidden gem of a series, I also probably wouldn’t have discovered it if it weren’t for my friend’s recommendation. It talks about the people who leave us, yes, but most importantly it talks about what they leave behind. Not only in belongings, but also in memories. And that there will always be at least one person who will accept to continue remembering them, even when it seems they have no one left to say goodbye to. Passing can happen in so many ways, by old age, by own choice, by accident, by illness, but no death is less important than the other. Every single person who passes had a life, and in some tragic cases, they weren’t able to fulfill their future goals. But then it always comes down to the people still alive to carry on in their memory. And we need to remind all those people wasting their time on complaining when they’ll take away the trauma cleaning car since it attracts too much unwanted attention to the neighborhood about what’s most important.
Besides this, I was really interested in the whole notion of the trauma cleaning service. It was again something that made me go, ‘Right, of course there are services like this’, but I really never stopped to think about it. I would think you’d need to be quite strong to be able to clean out the room of a dead person without feeling any attachment, but of course it’s okay to care, and I liked that they made such an effort to at least figure out what happened to the person, what were the circumstances of their death, and who was the final person that would care the most about receiving their last possessions. Like, in some cases it even became kind of a detective-like mission and that was really nice because you know this wasn’t meant for entertainment, but for the sole purpose of giving someone’s last belongings to someone who cared, so that even after they passed, their memory would still be in good hands. And I thought that was really beautiful.

So if you’re interested in series that focus more on story and character development and serious themes, even though that means it may not be as quick-paced sometimes, I would really recommend this because it really is very healing and it shines a very hopeful light on the idea that through this work, the main characters made sure that indeed, the deceased never truly left their loved ones.

I’ll be going about my next watch list item again, but I may definitely insert more of these in-between series. Sometimes it’s nice to divert from the path to make an interesting newly discovered detour. 🙂 Thanks for reading and I’ll be back soon! Bye-bee! ^^