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 Light in Your Eyes
(눈이 부시게 / Nuni Busigye)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Ha! Surprise! I was able to finish one more drama within July after all!
I didn’t even know that I would be able to, but when I saw this one was only 12 episodes, I thought I might. And I went through it pretty fast, so here we are! Going on with my original to-watch list, this hidden gem from 2019 has been waiting for me and boy, was it a surprise. It’s been a while since I’ve been so impressed with a final plot twist in a K-Drama.
I’ve known about this series ever since I saw the promotions of the two main leads, and these two main leads were a big reason for me to put it on my list. I really hope I’ll be able to make this a worthwhile review as I very much want to defend this drama. As I was watching I saw a lot of negative comments about it, and I just want to prove these wrong because this drama is so much more than its pace and lack of romantic comedy, at least in the way that most people are probably used to in K-Dramas. It deserves to be acknowledged for its unique profoundness.
Okay, so, without further ado, let’s get started.

I say without further ado, but I actually really have to think about how to explain the story, because there is just so much to it that’s only explained at the very end. I will try to construct this review in the way of how I processed it while watching. If that makes sense.

The Light in Your Eyes is a 12-episode K-Drama series with episodes of about an hour each. The protagonist of this drama is 25-year old Kim Hye Ja (played by Han Ji Min). She lives with her mother (Lee Jung Eun), father (Ahn Nae Sang) and older brother Young Soo (Son Ho Joon) in a small town. Her mother owns a small hairsalon. Hye Ja is in the bloom of her youth, but she is struggling with what she wants to do with her life. She keeps changing paths and career choices as she keeps realizing it’s not what she wants to do for herself – her current ambition to become a news anchor has been her choice because of a senior she liked who is studying to become a reporter and because she’s often told that she has a nice voice. However, when she meets her senior’s friend and fellow reporter-to-be Lee Joon Ha (Nam Joo Hyuk), and he confronts her by asking why she wants to be a news anchor, she realizes again that it’s not her true dream. Hye Ja keeps running into Joon Ha as they live in the same neighborhood, and they develop a mutual though subtle interest in each other. However, just as it seems like they might soon become a couple, something very drastic happens in both their lives, basically on the same day.

Hye Ja has been the owner of a beautiful old golden watch that she found on the beach as a child. She’s realized that with this watch, she can turn back time. She’s used the watch several times as a kid, just to give herself more time to sleep or study, but as a side effect it has caused her to start looking older than her age. At the age of 10, she’s already taller than all the boys in her class and so she stops using the watch. However, one day, Hye Ja’s father gets into a fatal car accident and passes away. Unable to accept it, Hye Ja desperately uses the watch and does a 100,000 attempts to wake up early enough that morning to stop him from getting into the accident, until she finally manages to reach him just in time. When she wakes up the next morning and her dad is still in the kitchen, she can’t be happier – but her family members all look at her very weirdly. Why? Her excessive use of the watch has caused her to turn into an 80-year old lady overnight.

Joon Ha is living with his grandmother (Kim Young Ok, breaking hearts as always), but he has a very bad relationship with his father (Kim Seung Chul). His father pops by sometimes, but he always just makes trouble, gets drunk, threatens Joon Ha and granny, and Joon Ha just wants him to disappear from their lives forever. One night, when his father imposes on them again and won’t leave, Joon Ha goes so far as to maim himself with a rock and report his father to the police for allegedly abusing him – it’s the only way to get him away. However, his grandmother can’t live with the lie and goes to the police to tell them that her grandson falsely reported her son. The night after she does so, she passes away. Joon Ha finds her and completely breaks down as she was the last remaining relative that ever treated him warmly. Then he also gets arrested for falsely accusing his father of abusing him and things just basically go all the way down for him within one day. The only person that was able to comfort him lately was Hye Ja, but she has suddenly disappeared into thin air overnight and now this strange old lady claiming to be her great-aunt starts bothering him.

So both main leads end up going through a drastic change overnight. Hye Ja has to come to terms with her new physical conditions – luckily her family and her two best friends believe her immediately when she tells them what happened. Joon Ha is thrown into the dark, with no one left to support him. He throws away his reporter ambitions and starts working at an Exhibition Center turned Nursery Home for elderly people that basically scams these people into buying fake supplements and insurances just so they can catch the payouts when they die. The guy who runs this scheme, is the only ‘friend’ that stood by Joon Ha when his grandmother died, and so Joon Ha feels like he has to repay him by joining him in this job he so graciously bestowed upon him in his darkest moment.

Hye Ja (now played by Kim Hye Ja, yes, the actress has the same name as the character) initially wants to figure out what’s happened to her by trying to fix the watch, but the model is so old that no watchmaker can repair it anymore. Especially when she sees Joon Ha again and realizes he’s been struggling so much in the meantime and she can’t help him, she gets desperate on many occasions. But she eventually has to start accepting that this is her life now, she can’t go back. She gave up her youth to save her father’s life. She has to deal with everyone referring to her as her brother’s grandmother and her parents’ mother(-in-law). When she hangs out with her two best friends, she’s perceived as their grandmother as well. Reluctantly, she agrees to start spending time at the Nursery Home and finds Joon Ha there, much to her surprise, as a cheerful-looking host and caretaker. As she goes about her way to figure out what’s happened to him, she meets some people in the center that she gets closer to. She gets used to making new friends ‘her own age’ and starts relating more and more to all the aspects of being old. This includes reprimanding her young friends when they make thoughtless comments, because ‘they don’t know how it feels to be old’.
At one point, Hye Ja comes across a man in the Nursery Home who is stuck in his wheelchair and never speaks, but he has the exact same golden watch on his wrist that Hye Ja used to have. No matter how much she tries to talk to him, he won’t budge and he won’t say anything that might give her any more information on the watch.

In hindsight, throughout all these events, we are already given some hints about the truth of the situation. We just don’t realize it yet. At one point, Hye Ja sees a young man with the golden watch and somehow immediately recognizes him as the old man in the wheelchair in his younger years. At that point, she doesn’t seem fazed by it, because she just assumes that he also changed between being young and old by using the watch’s powers.
When people in the streets comment on her walking with her father, she automatically adjusts her story that yes, indeed, this is her son, or when she’s walking with her mother, that this is her daughter-in-law.
Her father in particular starts acting strangely after Hye Ja turns into a granny. At first it seems like he just can’t get used to the fact that this has happened to his daughter, but it’s still different from how the others react to it. I kept wondering why it took him so long to deal with it, why he kept so silent and distanced and just looked at her with the same strange gaze. Also, ever since Hye Ja changed, he’s had a prosthetic leg and is limping. We’re initially led to believe that in the accident that was supposed to have killed him, this is now what he was left with instead, but even if that were the case, it’s still strange because there was no time leap in which Hye Ja might have missed that. So when did he suddenly get a prosthetic leg? That must have been quite a big happening, and yet Hye Ja is absolutely shocked when she walks in on her dad taking is leg off at one point.
Also, whenever the old man in the wheelchair sees Joon Ha at the Nursing Home, he starts screaming at him, almost as if he recognizes him but is scared out of his mind by the sight of him.
Again, these are all things that we realize in hindsight, after we figure out the truth of the whole story.

Besides Hye Ja’s and Joon Ha’s private lives, there’s also the stories of Hye Ja’s friends Lee Hyun Joo (Kim Ga Eun) and Yoon Sang Eun (Song Sang Eun). There’s the story between Young Soo and Hyun Joo, and their tucked-away-but-still-harbored feelings for each other.
And then there are the people at the Nursing Home, such as Mrs. Chanel/Choi Hwa Young (Jung Young Sook). At first she’s a very irritable lady who seemingly dislikes to be at the Nursing Home and looks down on everyone else, but Hye Ja is able to break down her walls and the two become friends. Mrs. Chanel (nicknamed for her sophisticated appearance) has a son who left for the States two years back but she hasn’t been able to contact him ever since. Joon Ha has been her contact person for keeping in touch with him, but what she doesn’t know is that Joon Ha also has no idea where her son is. All the letters and packages she’s passed on to him to be sent to her son are kept in the Nursing Home’s storage room. She’s being lied to as much as the other elderly people who are led to believe that the Nursing Home is just a fun hangout place for people who don’t have anyone left to care for them.
Mrs. Chanel eventually finds out the truth and Joon Ha, who by then has made up his mind to quit his job at the Nursing Home, helps her find her son who apparently has already been back in Korea for a while. She’s able to meet with her son, but it’s obvious he’s trying to keep her away from his family for some reason (still don’t understand why). After meeting with him, Mrs. Chanel accompanies Joon Ha to the airport as he’s planning to go away, and the next day she’s found dead by the river. She took her own life, apparently. Initially Joon Ha is arrested on the suspicion of murdering her, but they ultimately find her final note and he’s cleared. The worst thing is that Joon Ha’s ‘friend’ (Kim Hee Won) and his partner at the Nursing Home actually don’t even care about what happens to the elderly. When Mrs. Chanel dies, all they care about is whether they can get their hands on her insurance payout, and this finally drives them to the most inhuman plan: to send all the people that signed their insurance deal on a “picnic” with the real intention of orchestrating a tragic bus accident, and then to catch ALL their insurance payouts. In the meantime, they also catch Joon Ha, beat him up and lock him up in the basement of the Nursing Home so he can’t stop them. Hye Ja, along with the handful of people who haven’t signed the insurance scheme, come up with a plan to get all the elderly people out of the Nursing Home in time (which, in my opinion, was probably the best episode of the entire series).

But then, when that whole action plan has been finalized, that’s when we are hit by the biggest plot twist of all. Hye Ja, the real old Hye Ja, has Alzheimer’s. She has been staying at the Nursing Home for a while now. The man who we were led to believe was her father, is actually her son, and her mother her daughter-in-law. Her grandson Min Soo is the spitting image of her brother Young Soo, that’s why she’s been calling him Young Soo (it’s also the same actor). She’s starting to forget more and more, but what she can’t let go of are the memories of when she was 25 years old, of when she met her husband Joon Ha, and how they got married and had their son together.
In the final episode, the truth about Hye Ja’s real life comes to light. As happy as she and Joon Ha were in the 70s when they met and got married, Joon Ha was taken from her at a very young age. He was arrested for a reason that’s never explained, and he allegedly died in prison because of sudden pneumonia. After that, Hye Ja lost all her brightness and she even started being incredibly harsh on her young child, who’s had a limp from a car accident when he was really young (see the parallel?).
The old man in the wheelchair with the watch was actually an officer at the public relations office in charge of Joon Ha’s arrest, who selfishly stole the watch after Joon Ha passed away. He recognized Hye Ja in the Nursing Home after she tried to get the watch from him, but as he was no longer able to speak properly, he never got this across to her. Not that she would’ve remembered.
There’s a doctor at the Nursing Home, Kim Sang Hyun (also Nam Joo Hyuk) who is the spitting image of Joon Ha. The reason why the old man in the wheelchair keeps snapping whenever he see him is because he recognizes him too, as the man he once unjustifiedly locked up in prison in the 70s.

So basically, the entirety of the events in the series in which Hye Ja believes she is a 25-year old turned into an 80 year old lady because of the watch, is all a false reality created by the Alzheimer’s. At times, she’s lucid without even noticing it, when she refers to her father as her son and to her mother as her daughter-in-law for example. But we don’t find out until the final last couple of episodes. Only then the pieces are slowly fitted together. I have to admit that there are still several parts of the story that I’m not sure of whether they really happened or not, but in general it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is the final message and hidden plot of the story. Hye Ja even says it herself when the plot twist is revealed: ‘I’m not sure if it was my 25-year old self dreaming about being old, or the current me dreaming of my younger days’.

All in all, I believe the story to be about life and the time that you are given. That it’s the most important to live in the present without lingering onto the past or worrying too much about the future. To enjoy all the time that you have in the moment that you’re living it. Hye Ja’s time partially stopped after she lost Joon Ha, and she’s been clinging onto the happy days of the time when he was still alive so strongly that those happy days started to blend into her current life. She saw her young self turning old overnight, feeling like she lost all her time in an instant. She thought she was looking for the watch to try to get her time back, but in reality it was the final remaining thing she had left from her husband who was taken away from her too soon.

There are a lot of very touching moments in this series, even during the parts where we’re not even aware of what’s actually going on yet. There are so many depictions of life imbedded in the story, in both the young characters as the old ones. Some of my favorite moments were when Hye Ja broke down Mrs. Chanel’s walls by reminding her of her precious memories of Prague, the city that she’d visited with her husband, and the scene in which brief window reflections showed each elderly person’s younger self as they were making their way to the ocean after escaping the Nursing Home.
I thought these moments were so beautiful because they express the message of the entire series before we even figur it out. It really isn’t just about Hye Ja, it shows stories of life and youth from the perspective of all the elderly people, all their memories and lingering attachments. This is why it now makes sense to me why we were given the back stories of Mrs. Chanel, and even of the kleptomanic lady at the Nursing Home when she had to deal with the passing of her eldest daughter. Because that’s exactly what it was about. For elderly people, what they leave behind may be so much more important than what we care to acknowledge. The things they get to pass on to the next generation, getting to watch their children grow up and start their own families, all the things that make them feel like everything they had to go through in their own youth was worth it, their legacies.
Everyone grows old, and it can feel like it happens in the blink of an eye. In this series, Hye Ja relives her youth in the form of a dream (or nightmare) in which she literally loses all her time in one night – because that’s what it must have felt like when she had to keep living after losing her husband. She’s lived on, but was never able to fully let him go.

So yeah, it’s actually a very DEEP drama series, and definitely not what I’d expected. As I was watching it, I kept wondering where the story was going. I’ve also seen several comments of people that are halfway through the story who aren’t sure whether to continue because they can’t see where it’s going. And when the plot twist was revealed, initially I also didn’t understand it AT ALL. I’m glad those two final episodes were there to put the pieces together, but it was definitely a VERY unpredictable thing. The writers really took us all the way through a story that was already touching and heartwrenching from the start, and then just suddenly spun us around to show their true colors to make the whole message even more profound.
I feel like I can now throw all the in-between comments I jotted down in the beginning out of the window since that wasn’t even remotely what the series was about in the end. Things like why Hye Ja’s approach to stop her father from getting into that accident was so unpractical (she literally tried the same thing 50,000 times, how are you supposed to get a different result then?), seem so insignificant now. When it becomes clear that it was all in Hye Ja’s mind and that she got her parents mixed up with her son and daughter-in-law, the minor impracticalities really didn’t matter to me anymore.

As I’m on the topic, I want to make a special point of something, because some people on DramaCool were really hating on this series and I don’t think it’s fair. So there was this one user who kept posting negative comments about how it started out like a fun romantic comedy but then suddenly became super boring and depressing AND (this aggravated me the most) how the main actor’s skills were WASTED on this drama. I will give more detailed cast comments later as usual, but I just really found this unfair to say. It just seems to me that this person may not have even finished the drama and just based their opinion on the fact that all they cared about was a cute romance story. Having your own opinion about a series is good and legit, but to write it like that, just stating that it’s SO bad, that it’s the WORST series you’ve ever see, that it seemed as if the writers didn’t know where to go with the story — honestly, if you watch the last episode, EVERYTHING is explained, so I guess these people didn’t even finish it before making these comments. To post these kinds of things without even acknowledging the real message of a series, even if you’ve missed it yourself, just makes my blood boil. At some point, yes, it turns pretty dark and gloomy, especially when Joon Ha is thrown into hell. But that doesn’t immediately make it a bad drama. And it most certainly wasn’t a waste of the actor’s skills, because HECK, I’ve never seen Nam Joo Hyuk act like this before. He was INCREDIBLE. If he did anything, he showed that he had MORE skills than he’s showcased so far in ANY drama. Basically all he’s done before are romantic comedies. So I’m just mad at this person for commenting such ungrounded and misplaced negativity about this series. It deserves better. It deserves to be acknowledged. Just because it’s not your favorite genre doesn’t mean that it’s a bad series. Same goes for series that don’t end with a final kiss or other kind of ‘seal’ to confirm the relationship between the two leads. I think it’s such BS to base your negative review on things like that. I always try to keep an open mind with new series and this has allowed me to see positive things, even though it might not be my favorite genre.
In short, if you don’t like something, why force yourself to watch it just so you can post negative hate comments online and ruin it for the rest of us who actually do like it? You can just stop watching and keep your opinions to yourself if you don’t have anything nice to say. Sorry for this harshness from my side, but it just pissed me off how short-sighted these comments were – this series really deserves more than that.

Other than this, I’ve also found some really positive and inspiring theories and reviews which have opened my mind to even more possibilities. In the final two episodes, we see how Hye Ja and Joon Ha meet in the 70s. However, even though in the beginning we see both Hye Ja’s and Joon Ha’s stories separately, in the actual flashbacks of the 70s, we are shown everything only from Hye Ja’s perspective, and she is always expecting more from Joon Ha. She’s waiting for when he’ll kiss her, when he’ll propose to her, and even when they’re married and have a kid together, she keeps expecting him to do more, care for the child more, act more like a dad. I read a review from someone that suggested that this meant that Hye Ja always put herself and her own expectations first before actually considering Joon Ha’s feelings. We don’t get to find out why he doesn’t kiss her sooner or why it takes him so long to propose, or why he feels awkward with his son in the beginning. The whole story of his arrest is fishy as well since Hye Ja ends up not knowing ANYTHING about it. Through her eyes, her husband is suddenly arrested and when she visits him in jail he’s been beaten up, the detectives treat him like a criminal, and still no one tells her anything about what’s going on. Joon Ha even dies without her knowing, they just receive a Death Notification at home and that’s it, she can come collect his stuff. As far as we know, Joon Ha may have had a whole thing going on, something that had been weighing on him for a long time that may have caused his absent-mindedness and hesitation to start a family with Hye Ja. We don’t know. But the thing about the theory I read is that it suggested that Hye Ja, in her hallucinations, may have been trying to make up for this as well. In her fake reality, she cares about Joon Ha a lot and we get to see his entire backstory of what’s happening with his dad and his grandmother. So within her hallucinations Hye Ja may not have been just yearning back to the old days of when she was happy, she may have also been trying to save Joon Ha before it was too late. After all, in her imagination, she IS able to save him when he’s beaten up and locked up in the basement of the Nursing Home. She IS able to save him from hurting himself to frame his dad. In her false reality, she keeps him from harm and cares about him, in a way she hasn’t done in real life. The watch may have been the trigger for the regrets she’s had for not caring for him enough while he was still alive. If you consider this theory, then there’s a whole other layer of sadness to their relationship.
I actually know of a play in which a wife cares for her Alzheimer husband and repaints their whole history to him to make him sound like this wonderful person even though he used to be an absolute jerk and their life has been one rocky road from the start. It may have been a similar concept as that. I think this is a very interesting theory!

What’s also interesting is that, as I mentioned before, the backstories of the seemingly minor characters such as Mrs. Chanel and the kleptomaniac lady with their children are just different examples of child-parent relationships in terms of dependence. We can see it even in how Young Soo is depicted in Hye Ja’s youth. He’s the oldest son, but all he does is lazy around the house, he doesn’t have a job and he’s always just asking his mom to bring him food. Apparently this isn’t an uncommon thing to happen in Korean society, the oldest child continuously leaning on his parents while it should be the other way around.
In Mrs. Chanel’s case, her son never leaned on her again after first going to the States and then coming back after his business there failed. He never got back in touch with her and he doesn’t even feel guilty for walking away from her after she passes away.
In the case of the kleptomaniac lady, we find out that her eldest daughter is in the hospital with cancer. The daughter has been the one who did the most, even for her two younger brothers, but now that she’s sick, the two younger brothers come asking their elderly mother at the Nursing Home for money. They don’t even care to think about their older sister, no matter what she’s done for them, they only care about the money that their sister now won’t even be able to use anymore. The scene in which the ghost of the daughter comes to visit her mom for the last time and tells her that she’s all better now and that she should give the money to her brothers, was so touching. The way the lady slowly realized that her daughter’s appearance wasn’t real was killing.
Looking at these individual cases, and seeing all these different ways in which children and parents depend on each other (or not), only gives this series an even more meaningful layer.
This is why I enjoy reading other reviews, because they always open up even more possibilities than the ones I have and even though they might just be subjective, I always find it interesting what other people manage to get out of the story. I’m happy to see that there’s still a lot of people who think of this series as meaningful and worthwhile and who are critical towards people who post negative comments about it.

Moving on, I found it rather interesting that Hye Ja managed to have a dream within her own dream. In her dream of becoming an old lady, she actually dreams that she turns young again for a couple of days. She returns to a day or so before her father’s accident, before Joon Ha gets into trouble for reporting his dad. She manages to stop Joon Ha from hurting himself and gets him to briefly live up again as she is able to stay by his side. Although I did find it weird that, even in that dream, no one even remembered that she’d turned into an old lady – it was just as it had always been before she changed and she was the only one with the memory of turning old. So it wasn’t like she actually went back in time again to change some events from happening, which I thought at first. It was really just a dream within her already ongoing dream.
Another interesting thing is that we get to watch whole storylines unfold without Hye Ja even being directly involved, even though it still happens within her hallucination. For example, the whole story of Young Soo and Hyun Joo slowly reconnecting and Sang Eun’s career path towards becoming a singer. All these things happen in the respective characters’ own storylines while Hye Ja isn’t even there, but they are still part of Hye Ja’s imagination. In real life, Hyun Joo and Sang Eun are still the same age as Hye Ja, they’re old now as well, Hyun Joo married Young Soo and Sang Eun became a trot singer.
By the way, I did wonder about one thing. As I mentioned in the beginning, her family and two best friends immediately believe her when she tells them that she’s Hye Ja who turned into an old lady. Of course they did, because it was her imagination in which everyone believed her. But she never even tried to tell Joon Ha. In the beginning I found myself thinking that, if she’d told Joon Ha and used some topics they’d talked about to prove it was really her, he would’ve probably also believed her. But for some reason she never even bothered trying to tell him what had become of her, she just kept telling him that her great niece Hye Ja had suddenly moved to Germany and wouldn’t come back. She kept asking him if he missed her, but she never went so far as to confide in him about what had happened to her, even though he knew about the watch and everything. In hindsight, could this have been because in her subconscious, she didn’t want Joon Ha to know that it was her trying to make amends with him? That she was fine helping him out and saving him while he didn’t know who she really was? Could that have been a reason? It just baffled me in the beginning why she wouldn’t even try to convince him that she was Hye Ja, but referring to previous theories of other people, this might be a plausible explanation of why she chose to keep a distance and tried to help him from afar.

Another peculiar thing about this series, although this isn’t per se about the story itself, is that part of the cast actually got to keep their own names in the show or names that are similar to their own. Besides that, its feeling of authenticity for me also really stemmed from the people in it, and then I mostly mean the elderly people. Honestly, they didn’t even feel like actors to me. It really just felt like they might have been a bunch of neighborhood grandmas and grandpas that got to participate on this project. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all, they were just different kinds of people from people that are clearly ‘casted’ as elderly people. For example, the three ladies that frequented the hairsalon had a different feel to them than the three grannies in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha to me, because the latter seemed to be really ‘casted’ as and made to look like typical grannies. I hope I’m explaining my point well, but I just mean to say that using the actors’ own names and including all these elderly people that didn’t seem out of place at the Nursing Home at all just added to the authenticity of the series.

All in all, this series has made me much more considerate of the elderly, especially as it makes you realize that they have to deal with so much negativity in society. They’re viewed as a nuisance and easy targets, and we forget to consider that they’ve lived full respectable lives themselves and that they’ve seen incredible and horrifying things in their own youth.
Two scenes that made my jaw drop in disbelief because of the disrespect that younger people showed to the elderly were when Hye Ja was with her mother/daughter-in-law at a department store and the fire alarm went off. She got onto an elevator with a bunch of other (younger) people, and when the maximum capacity was reached, everyone just looked at Hye Ja to get out. Of course this all happened in Hye Ja’s imagination, but at the time I was shook that all these young people immediately turned on the elderly woman to leave the elevator, to make more space for the younger people.
The other scene, which was also a very satisfying scene in a way, was when Hye Ja and Mrs. Chanel went to a consultation at a plastic surgeon. There was a very disrespectful young couple there that just started making fun of them as soon as they entered. The guy even started taking unconsented pictures to make fun of the two elderly ladies. Hye Ja then proceeded to give the youngsters a finger-snapping speech and this was an amazing moment. The speech in itself was so powerful and meaningful. I found it so ridiculous that these young people would judge an elderly person for getting a consultation, especially since an older person would need it even more than they would at their young age. It just put in perspective how much disrespect there still is between different generations, even though we should’ve all been raised with the habit of respecting our elders. Especially in a society like Korea, where even a one-year difference already impacts the way you’re allowed to speak to someone… This was unbelievable to me.

What starts as a seemingly cute love story with the fantastical event of the main female lead suddenly turning into an 80-year old lady, actually spins out to be a story about living your life to the fullest, but also about holding onto the past. It’s about dealing with regrets when getting older, being aware of losing time. Hye Ja, initially depicted as a bright and sweet girl, finds herself confronted with her own youthful selfishness when she’s older, and attempts to make up for these regrets in her subconsciousness as she’s nearing the end of her lifetime. At the end, Joon Ha is waiting for her to come join him at the ocean, and she jumps into his arms, never to let go again.

Finally I just want to comment on how Hye Ja managed to mix up all the people in her life and made them fit into her hallucination.
Her false reality takes place in modern times, while her real youth took place in the 70s.
In her false reality, her mother owns a hairsalon in which Hye Ja occasionally helps out, but in reality Hye Ja was the one who used to be a hairstylist and her daughter-in-law helped her out.
In the false reality, her brother Young Soo spends his days streaming mukbangs and sleep rooms from his bedroom, whilst in reality her brother was busy with radio broadcasts as of course these modern-day stream platforms didn’t exist yet. She has mixed up her brother with her grandson who looks just like him, as he is also shown vlogging when he visits her at the Nursing Home – she also calls him Young Soo on several occasions, so that was already a sign in itself.
She remembers Hyun Joo and Sang Eun exactly how they are, as Hyun Joo is still making deliveries for her family’s restaurant and Sang Eun has become a famous singer.
In her false reality, she mixes up her son and her father, she stops her father from getting into a car accident, while in reality it was her young son who got into a car accident, which caused him to get a prosthetic leg, which caused him to always get bullied for the way he walked.
She mixes up Kim Sang Hyun and Joon Ha as they look so much alike.
She doesn’t fully realize she recognizes the old man in the wheelchair, even though his younger version literally appears to her in the false reality and she’s immediately able to see that he is that man, but at that point she still thinks that he also lost his youth due to the watch. She doesn’t realize she recognizes him as the officer that locked up her husband.
In her false reality, Joon Ha’s ‘friend’ and the other employees at the Nursing Home represent the people that take advantage of the elderly, and most importantly, the people that have taken her husband away from her, the bad people that have to be stopped, that she has to save Joon Ha from. In reality, they are just normal, caring employees at the Home she is staying at.

I hope I was able to convey the story coherently enough up to now. I was no exception to the mind-blowing effect of the plot twist and I’ve found myself reading other reviews to make sense of it as well before writing my own thoughts down. It’s such a strange experience trying to write a summary whilst knowing that it’s based on a false reality, so I really wondered how to go about it. Anyways, I hope my construction for this review makes sense, haha. I would now very much like to move on to my cast comments before concluding.

Han Ji Min is seriously growing on me with every drama I see of her. She’s so good. I’ve seen her before in Rooftop Prince, Hyde, Jekyll, Me, and Wife I Know, and with each series I feel like I see a new side to her acting. She always manages to pull me in. I think so far her role in Wife I Know has been my favorite, but in The Light in Your Eyes I wasn’t any less impressed with her. I love how she managed to portray the two sides of Hye Ja, the one she herself chooses to remember in her imagination, and the one she seems to regret in her actual flashbacks, the one who failed to see what her husband was going through, and who was harsh to her child after losing him. I’m looking forward to some other dramas with her that are still on my to-watch list. I really enjoyed her performance in this drama and I loved seeing her paired up with Nam Joo Hyuk – their age gap of 11 years didn’t even stand out to me (she was 36 when this drama aired while Nam Joo Hyuk was 25). I can’t believe she’s almost 40 already! In so many ways it feels like the drama was written for these actors specifically, as they even created an explanation as to why she looked older than her age, although of course it wasn’t caused by using the watch to go back in time. She was the perfect casting choice for young Hye Ja, she was funny, touching, raw… she just showed so many different sides. I thought she was amazing.

It feels like only yesterday that I first saw Nam Joo Hyuk in Who Are You – School 2015 when he was only 21 years old and I remember thinking what a cute little puppy he was – and now he’s here, nearing 30 and acing every main role he’s getting. It was SO great to see him in such a mature role and not the typical ‘male lead in romantic comedy’ that he usually gets. He’s finally grown out of the student typecast! I’ve seen almost every single drama he’s done so far. He’s been in Surplus Princess, Who Are You – School 2015, Cheese in the Trap, Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Bride of the Water God, and Start-Up. The School Nurse Files and Twenty One Twenty Five are still on my to-watch list. So yeah, as I’ve mentioned before I got angry at this comment for stating that this series wasted Nam Joo Hyuk’s acting skills because this has got to be one of the best performances I’ve seen of him so far. He’s only proven that he’s a more versatile actor, this drama has only accelerated his talents! It was really nice to see him here, because in hindsight it really feels like he played two different characters. It was also interesting to see a glint of despair and evil in him as he was defending his job at the Nursing Home while being fully aware of what they were doing. All in all, he was excellent in this series and I won’t take any other response to his performance.

Kim Hye Ja, the woman that stole everyone’s heart in this series. It’s only fair that she got to keep her own name, because it kind of felt like it was a hommage to her herself in the end. I haven’t seen her in anything before, but I see that she’s in Our Blues, which I really want to watch as well, so I’m looking forward to that! Even though there may have been some minor frustrations with her character, like impracticalities or things that she was clumsy at, it only just added to her credibility as a real layered person. I love how she portrayed Hye Ja, and how there were different sides to her. On the one hand she was the main character and she had to lead the action, but then at the end there was something mysterious about her as well. As she suddenly became a main character with an element of incredibility (because of her Alzheimer’s), we never fully get to know her honest thoughts. We get to assume that she may have had regrets when it comes to her past with her husband, but she never affirms anything herself. All we can understand is that, for one reason or another, she’s been clinging onto her youth, onto her husband, and it seems like finally obtaining the watch and the apology of the man in the wheelchair to find closure. It isn’t until the very end that we discover the true profanity of Hye Ja’s character, and it just makes one feel for her even more.

I just realized that Son Ho Joon is the main male lead from Go Back Couple! I was wondering why he looked so familiar. It was funny to see him in this drama, especially since he was the comic relief character here. I hadn’t really considered him to be a typical comical actor, but I think he did really well. As Young Soo in Hye Ja’s imagination, he really was a good-for-nothing son who did nothing useful with his life but also didn’t mind living like that. He was always trying to earn money by streaming from his bedroom, whether it was mukbangs or 48-hour sleep rooms. He shamelessly used his sister-turned-grandmother and ex who still had feelings for him as tools to get more stars on these streams, but every now and then we got to see a little bit sensitivity from him, exaggerated or not. As Min Soo, Hye Ja’s grandson, he seemed to at least be a bit more mature, although he still did the streaming thing.

I have seen several dramas with Ahn Nae Sang before, he’s quite a familiar face. Amongst the drama series I’ve watched, he was in Sungkyunkwam Scandal, The Moon That Embraces the Sun, Kill Me, Heal Me, Moonlight Drawn By Clouds, Just Between Lovers. A lot of historical dramas, I believe, and he always plays a father (figure). I found it very interesting how his character got such a twist at the end. All the while I was wondering why he started acting so weird after Hye Ja had changed, but now I know he just became her son after that. The whole character of Hye Ja’s imagined father from when she was still 25, was false, her real parents were two completely different people. So that was interesting. It was nice that his character also got some closure, as he’d always partially resented his mother for neglecting him as a child after his father died. Even he, as a grown man, had things to process and let go of when it came to his mother. It was very powerful to also add in his side of the story at the end.

Lee Jung Eun is one of my favorite Korean actresses because she ALWAYS manages to touch me. In this series, it was no exception. What an incredible actress. I’ve seen her in a bunch of stuff before, like High Schooler King of Life, Who Are You – School 2015, Oh My Ghostess, Jealousy Incarnate, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Tomorrow With You, Fight For My Way and Wife I Know, and then I’m excluding a couple of cameos. And of course, Parasite. I believe she also played Han Ji Min’s mom in Wife I Know! I LOVED her in this series. As a mother in Hye Ja’s fake reality she was so tough and down to earth, but she also showed such a fragile side, especially when she turned out to be Hye Ja’s daughter-in-law. The part where she realized Hye Ja didn’t recognize her anymore was just heartwrenching. And how she was determined to keep her marriage to Dae Sang going, she didn’t accept that he was willing to let her go because he thought it was going to be too much for her to keep taking care of his mom. Lee Jung Eun was, once again, incredible. I want her to play my mom just so I can hug the heck out of her, honestly.

It was so cool to see Kim Ga Eun as a tomboy character in this series! I barely recognized her at first! I’ve always just seen her as the typical girly best friend, so it was really nice to see this other side of her. So far I’ve seen her in I Hear Your Voice, Reunited Worlds and Because This is My First Life. I liked Hyun Joo’s character, because I could really relate to her feelings. You could see that she was bothered by her feelings for Young Soo but she also realized she couldn’t ignore them no matter how hard she tried. Being in love with someone that you know is a loser and an idiot can’t be easy. I guess Hye Ja just kept pushing them together in her false reality because she knew that they loved each other, as they’d gotten married and had a kid together in reality. By the way, I loved how old Hyun Joo was played by Son Sook and that she was still delivering food at the age of 80, haha.

I was so surprised to hear Song Sang Eun’s voice in this drama! I recently saw her in Abyss, and I don’t think she talked like that there! That’s a real skill, especially to keep it going throughout the entire series and also in song! But now I see that she’s a musical actress as well, no wonder her singing is so good! Her typical “Waah~ romantic hada~~” will echo through my head for a while, haha. I liked that, even though she didn’t have as much of a storyline as Hyun Joo, her goal to become a singer was taken as a serious aspect of the story and we still got to root for her in that. It was funny how they made it so she would change her stagename to Bok Hee, I didn’t even know the real singer but the way that she said it immediately made me think, Aha, that must be real singer. Just like how the little boy in the kitchen of Hyun Joo’s family restaurant that was teaching Young Soo how to cut onions introduced himself with the name of a famous chef. They made this tiny references to real people, which was nice. Anyways, I liked her character in this show, she was really cute! It was also very cool that they got the actual singer Yoon Bok Hee to play her older version, it just all fell into place, haha.

Kim Young Ok, I can never fail to mention her even though she had a really minor role in this as Joon Ha’s grandmother… Once again, she stole my heart. Just wanted to mention it.

Kim Hee Won was another example of someone who got to keep their own name in this series. I’ve seen him in Oh! My Lady (ages ago), You Who Came From The Stars, and apparently he had a cameo in Drinking Solo and Let’s Fight Ghost, but I don’t remember that. Anyways, he looked familiar to me. While he initially seemed to be a good friend to Joon Ha, and the only one backing him up after his grandma died, getting his father off him during the funeral and even setting Joon Ha up with a new job, he turned into such a nasty person – in Hye Ja’s false reality, that is. In reality, he was a super sweet and sensitive caretaker at the Nursing Home and submissive to his partner, whilst it had been the other way around in the false reality. I’m glad Hye Ja’s representation of him was false, because no one should be as bad as that, willingly able to orchestrate a bus accident to kill a bunch of elderly people just to collect their insurance payouts. I guess this series gave the actor a good opportunity to showcase a duality to his acting as well!

The old man in the wheelchair looked SO familiar to me and when I looked him up I realized that it’s Prince Boo Young from The King: Eternal Monarch!! OMG!! I loved him so much there and I remember being SOOOO mad when he was killed!! T^T How could I not recognize him sooner! Anyways, his performance here just showed a completely different side to his acting, even though he didn’t actually get to say much, he still managed to keep me intrigued and I had so many theories about who he was in the end! It was cool how they eventually made him fit into the whole picture and how even he got to atone for his deeds in his own way.

Okay! So, to conclude this review: it was a WILD ride. I didn’t know what to expect, but this was definitely not it. And I mean that in the best way possible. It totally made it worth my wondering about where the story was going and how it was going to end. I love how it was a happy ending, but not in the traditional kind of way. There was a lot of sadness and regret imbedded into it, so it was more of an inevitable happy ending. An ending in which there was no other way than to move on, because it didn’t do to linger onto a past that you couldn’t change. Hye Ja ended up changing her past subconsciously through her Alzheimer episodes, and in doing so, she enabled herself to let go of her regrets and move on. In the end, all the antics and events that happen in the beginning aren’t even that significant or important to anyone besides Hye Ja. They only hold meaning for her because it’s her way to cope, both with growing old before she knew it and with the loss of her husband. We are swept along in her two realities combined into one ideal reality, one in which she gets to spend more time with the love of her life before the rest of her time is taken away from her. I think the way it was constructed by the writers was amazingly clever, and in hindsight, everything made sense. If I were to now watch it again from the top, knowing that the beginning is all false reality, I’m sure that I’ll be able to see right through it. But the way we are kept within the same confusion and desperation as Hye Ja when she convinces herself that she lost all her time because of a time-turning watch was just geniously played out. It really kept me wondering all the way through until the truth was dropped like the mind-blowing bomb it was.

I’m glad I got to watch this hidden gem of a drama, it’s truly one of a kind. I would strongly suggest people watch the whole thing before they come to a conclusion about how they interpret it, and don’t start turning up with comments about how ‘boring and depressing’ it is, because that just shows that you haven’t given it a real chance. If you’re only interested in funny and light romantic comedies, this might not be for you. But if you want to give it a chance, at least give it a fair one and don’t judge it on factors that don’t even apply to its genre. I, for one, am glad that I gave it a chance. It really surprised me and it has a very touching message that we can all learn something from.

Well then, that was officially it for July! I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get back with a new review, but I’m not going to rush anything. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish my next one within August, but who knows what will happen! To make one final reference to this series, you never know what’s waiting for you in life and how much time you’ll be able to commit to something. In any case, I hope this has been a worthwhile review and I will be back soon.

Bye-bee!!