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 School Nurse Files
(보건교사 안은영 / Bogeongyosa Ahn Eun Young / School Nurse Ahn Eun Young)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10
Hello everyone! Again, it’s only been a week since my last review – I swear I’m not picking these dramas out for their length! I had no idea this show would only be 6 episodes, but here we are. Despite the short length, I feel like this will be a hard review to write since the ‘bizarro’ level of this show is so high I am certain that I didn’t understand every single aspect of the story. I can only share the personal thoughts I had while watching it, all the while being aware that I’m probably missing a lot of hidden layers and symbolisms. I’ve read some additional reviews and I found that a lot of people recognized things that I completely missed, so please be aware that I wrote this review while probably not being aware of a lot of things. I hope I can still make it worthwhile because I do want to discuss it. It was a very unique, original, bizarre and absurd experience watching this show. It wasn’t like anything I’ve seen before. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it definitely exceeded my expectations.
The School Nurse Files is a 6-episode Netflix K-Drama, and each episode lasts about 50 minutes. It’s based on a novel with the same title by Jung Se Rang, who also acted as screenwriter for this drama adaptation. The School Nurse Files follows Ahn Eun Young (played by Jung Yoo Mi), who recently started working as the school nurse at Mokryeon High School. Ever since she was born, she has been able to see what she calls ‘Jellies’, jelly-like alien creatures that not only walk, drift and float all around, but that also form between people like sticky goo. She initially describes Jellies as the stuff snails leave behind, and they take on many different forms and substances. I’ve read a couple of reviews to enlighten myself before writing my own, but it’s overall agreed that the Jellies symbolize ‘human emotions’, and mostly ones that are tough to get rid of – sadness, regret, heavy stuff. Eun Young used to be a regular nurse at a hospital, but a family-like friend of hers recommended Mokryeon to her as the Jellies she’d face at a school would at least be a little less serious than the ones she encountered at the hospital, surrounded by loss and grief. Sure, what better place to find exceedingly messy human emotions than in a high school full of teenagers, where hormones run even wilder because of its repressing and conforming nature? Armed with a toy gun and a rainbow-colored plastic sword, Eun Young strives to strike down as many Jellies within the school as she can. We don’t really know for sure if Jellies are good or evil, it’s never specified what they actually do around the premises, but Eun Young is typically depicted running around the school eradicating them with her invented toy weapons. To everyone around her, she’s literally swinging a toy sword at empty air, but since everyone generally thinks of her as ‘weird’, no one even really notices it anymore.
The school where Eun Young works is peculiar in itself. After the founder of the school passed away, the school’s slogan, ‘Laughing Will Bring Good Fortune’ has been passed down by the remaining staff – every morning the principal leads a virtual chant to all students in which they have to praise their own physical health and laugh out loud for 15 seconds straight. There are portraits and paintings of the founder throughout the school, and even a statue of him at the entrance.
One day, Eun Young discovers a weird energy coming from a basement door that’s padlocked – according to the staff only a certain cleaning company that sterilizes the basement once a year has access to it. However, no one has been able to get a hold of that company for a while now, and the basement door has been locked ever since the founder passed away. In the first episode, something coming from that basement leaks through and stings one of the students. Eun Young realizes something bad is happening, and she goes to see the student’s homeroom teacher, Chinese Characters teacher Hong In Pyo (played by Nam Joo Hyuk). Upon meeting him, she is surprised to see that he has some sort of forcefield around him that protects him from the Jellies. He also exudes a kind of energy that enhances Eun Young’s own, and it’s later revealed that when she holds his hand, he literally has the ability to ‘power’ her aura. Despite this power that he’s not even aware of himself, In Pyo has a disability: he hurt his leg in a motorcycle accident and hasn’t been able to walk properly since. Even with his bad leg, he quickly finds himself drawn to Eun Young and starts helping her out even though he isn’t able to see the Jellies himself. Eun Young and In Pyo form a surprising bond in which they try to find solutions to help students that get affected by the Jellies.
As I mentioned in my introduction, while I most definitely missed a lot of markers in this show, that certainly doesn’t mean I wasn’t able to acknowledge and appreciate its originality and out-of-the-box-ness. I found its weirdness refreshing and was immediately impressed by how all the actors took the liberty of portraying the most extreme sides of their characters, from manical laughter and crying to near-psychotic outbursts of other emotions. The tone is undeniably set in the first episode, when half of the students are suddenly turned into zombie-like creatures that try to jump off the school roof to plunge into the mouth of a giant toad-like Jelly monster that’s been hidden below the school grounds.
Throughout the story, Eun Young finds herself having to deal with a whole lot of stuff, including severing a navel cord-like connection that binds two students together, helping a ‘mite-eater’ whose sole purpose of existence is to eat all the negative energy mites in the school become human, and dealing with the death of an old school friend. Through every single event we see that Eun Young just can’t stop herself from helping out everyone as much as she can. In this way, it’s kind of natural that the energy this takes her, just like the energy it takes to constantly take care of people – she’s a nurse, after all – can be incredibly draining and In Pyo becomes her literal charging battery. Despite his own injury, In Pyo doesn’t seem bothered by anything going on in his life, he’s fully accepted his situation and apparently has loads of emotional supportive energy to spare, because he never runs out of power to assist Eun Young.
On the other hand, we find out that there are more people around in the school who can see the Jellies and who are somehow involved in ‘everything’, but who all deal with it differently than Eun Young does. The new English teacher Mackenzie (played by Yoo Tae Oh) even takes to selling Jellies to students to help them in certain situations – he decides to make money out of it and get the students to ‘solve’ their own issues rather than helping them himself. In one episode he helps a boy who’s regularly bullied by a group of guys from his basketball team to get his spot on the team back by giving him new sneakers that are infused with some sort of grass Jelly. Even after finding out Mackenzie’s point of view on the matter, Eun Young can’t see eye to eye with him and his own selfish ways of dealing with the Jellies.
At the base of all things, including the school and the founder -who also happens to be In Pyo’s grandfather, I failed to mention before- is a certain organization called Safe Happiness (abbreviated to HSP in Korean). I still don’t exactly understand what this organization was about, but it gave me major cult vibes. It turns out that Ilgwang Sterilization, the company that’s supposed to clean the school’s basement every year, is part of HSP, and several members of the school staff are part of it as well. Eun Young’s acupuncturist friend is also revealed to be HSP’s leader in the final episode, a plot twist that would’ve made me go🤯🤯 if only I’d had a better understanding of what it all entailed, lol. Honestly, the HSP part was the most confusing to me. In the final episode it’s revealed that In Pyo’s grandfather also used to be a part of HSP, but after he passed away, suddenly the basement became off-limits to HSP. All the members kept saying that they needed Eun Young and In Pyo at the school because they couldn’t enter the school or the basement yet themselves. What was that about? As the company that had been cleaning it every year, why could they suddenly not enter it anymore? Eun Young and In Pyo weren’t even knowingly working for HSP, so why put so much expectation on them? I didn’t completely understand this, so if anyone knows, please enlighten me!
Since it’s a very arthouse-style series with many absurdistic shots and images and very little internal dialogue from the characters, I find it hard to write a character analysis. We only get to know most of the characters from the outside, we don’t learn anything about their childhood or inner battles, or what exactly goes on in anyone’s head. The only information we get about Eun Young’s past is that her parents got divorced because of her psychological Jelly issues, and she hasn’t had a real ‘family’ since, until she met her acupuncturist friend Hwa Soo (Moon So Ri). We don’t know much about our heroine besides that. We only get to see what we get to see, and admittedly, part of this show’s charm is that it’s really up to what you make of it – there are no literal explanations for what’s happening. As I’ve mentioned before, I am someone who doesn’t always penetrate the surface, I really need things spelled out to me or else I’m going to miss things. However, after reading some other reviews and theories, things have started making a bit more sense to me.
Let me start with the school being a symbol for repressed and conformed behavior. It makes sense to me now that this setting was chosen very deliberately. Maybe it’s because I haven’t personally related to high school as such a place from my own experience, but I can see how Mokryeon could be a depiction of a typical school in Korean society, where students are (unknowingly) encouraged to only excel within school grounds, to abide by the rules of ‘being happy’ without actually being given the opportunity to fully express their feelings when it comes to anything other than studying. Laughing Will Bring Good Fortune, but only within the school’s perimeter – they are literally forced to laugh aggressively for 15 seconds every morning before the school day starts. The thing about the laughing becomes more important later in the story, when it’s revealed that whatever’s inside that basement – a hole now blocked by a stone that used to be a pond – is attracted to laughter, and this is also what linked HSP to the whole case. Of course, laughter isn’t only brought forth by happiness. There’s spiteful laughter as well, laughter that results from bullying, laughter that can exclude people as much as include them. The group of students we meet at Mokryeon are definitely in the middle of a very turbulent time in their youths where they yearn for the unusual and crazy rather than the mundane everyday life. When a mite-eater joins them at school, they don’t even blink at their story and immediately accept them into their group – one of the girls even ends up dating them, making way for something even more shocking: a lesbian relationship on the school premises. How scandalous. (In case you missed it, that was sarcasm.)
The students deal with crushes, the pain of one-sided love and rejection, bullying, trying to conform to a union they don’t feel like they can conform to. There are so many messy feelings bubbling up in them, feelings they are not allowed to express in school, feelings that are released in tenfold once the Jellies take over. In the final episode, a literal tidal wave of bad energy comes rushing up from the basement that causes every single student and staff member to lose control over their repressed emotions: they start picking fights with each other and laugh openly at inappropriate jokes and discussions.
Even though the Jellies are supposedly ‘bad human emotions that need to be extinguished’, it’s interesting how some are depicted in such a cute, tiny and harmless form. They’re really just crawling around the school, they’re not actually hurting anyone. It might be just the idea that the school tries to create, that any kind of ‘worldly desire’ is distracting and is therefore labeled as a bad emotion. The emotions themselves just exist, unseen to the common eye, but definitely there. The fact that Eun Young tries to take them all on by herself seems to indicate a losing battle by default, because how can she possibly take on the suppressed raw emotions of an entire school of teenagers? Eun Young finds herself literally bending over backwards in order to help as many people as she can, without ever getting any acknowledgement for it – something Mackenzie also scoffs at her for – but she still does it because she can’t help herself. I liked this one review that referred to the anatomy doll she keeps carrying around the school on her back as a symbol of the literal ‘dead’ weight of her efforts weighing her down without anyone ever thanking her for it.
Eun Young catches a temporary break from it all after the ghost of her dead school friend Kang Sun (played by Choi Joon Young) explodes in front of her and she’s able to witness his death by construction accident in a kind of abstract flashback. From that point on, for some reason she suddenly can’t see the Jellies anymore and it gives her a peace of mind that she never knew before.
All in all, Eun Young has always lived her life considering herself to be ‘weird’ and unable to fit in. She sees Jellies and ghouls and monsters but she can’t explain it to anyone. Her power is an everyday burden to her that she’s reluctantly learned to live with, but once it disappears, she suddenly finds herself in such a peaceful and quiet world that she initially doesn’t even want the power back. When she regains her power in the final episode, her first reaction is to break out in a legit panic attack. Her repressed desire for wanting to be normal comes out abundantly clear in this scene, and it’s heartbreaking to see. It really made me think that she never wanted any of this power but really just dedicated herself to it because it was the only thing she could do to keep helping people, as an empathic human being rather than a nurse. Despite regaining her power only briefly after losing it, she does end up embracing it, and at the same time she also embraces In Pyo as the one person who’s always there to stand by her side and give her support.
To talk a bit more about the relationship between Eun Young and In Pyo, I loved how they basically confirmed the bond between each other without ever verbalizing it. Just by holding hands, it seemed like the two of them grew in confidence, and not just because of In Pyo’s forcefield. I thought it was very interesting to depict such a scrappy-looking, disabled homeroom teacher like In Pyo as an involuntary hero. You could almost say he’s emotionally invincible in contrast to Eun Young, despite the fact that he has to limp for the rest of his life. I really liked how this one review I read talked about his emotional resilience as his super power. Jellies don’t seem to have an effect on people who’ve already completely accepted themselves, quirks and all, and as we can see out of all the people in the school, there’s only so many people who remain unaffected by the Jellies throughout. I liked that they made such a lowkey character like In Pyo the attraction for people who can see the Jellies and how several teachers, including Mackenzie, are physically drawn to him and his energy. While Eun Young initially seems to be taken by him because of his energy as well, she starts finding more excuses to hold his hand and that’s really cute. Despite the fact that I found Eun Young’s thoughts and feelings a bit hard to gauge throughout the show, it was a nice twist that she became a bit greedy and pouty when it came to In Pyo. Without creating a cringy romantic tension, the writers managed to create this solid bond between them that really came through in that one moment in the final episode when In Pyo grabbed Eun Young’s hand while she was having her panic attack – that single moment of silence and realization between them was instantly enough to defeat the threat. The fact that there was this immense dangerous build-up and it was immediately undone by them holding hands was kind of sweet, though slightly anti-climactic.
Halfway through the show, we meet Baek Hye Min (played by Song Hee Joon), a mite-eater who’s been sent to Mokryeon High School purely to extinguish the immense wave of bad energy mites that the school’s been attracting. Looking like a high school girl, Hye Min tells Eun Young they’re actually genderless, and even admits that they’ve never been a woman before. Being a mite-eater, they’re only allowed to exist for the purpose of eating mites, and they’re only allowed to remain with a certain perimeter (in her case, 5,38 kilometers) and they’re not allowed to live longer than the age of 20. As Hye Min starts blending in with the other students at Mokryeon, not only do they find themselves fully accepted, but they even start yearning for a life ‘beyond the mold’, making them fit in even more with the theme of overall conformity. While the students yearn to scream and shout and let it all out but are repressed to do so within school property, Hye Min starts wondering about life beyond their literal restrictions, beyond the 5,38 kilometers, beyond the age of 20. Eun Young eventually decides to help Hye Min out by giving them a stomach removal that will turn them into a human.
Honestly, Hye Min’s story arc was my favorite because it was a chapter that was very clear to me in every aspect, and it was very touching to see to what extent Eun Young related to her – she also saw Hye Min for someone who existed for a purpose they didn’t ask for, longing for a mundane life to explore as they wished. I thought the bond between Eun Young and Hye Min was one of the most touching ones depicted in the story because the connection between them was so heartfelt and relatable. Here I truly felt for the first time how much Eun Young wanted to help her student, even more so because they weren’t even human, and Eun Young also barely felt like a normal human being herself. I thought the depiction of their relationship was really wonderful.
There are a couple of students that appear frequently throughout the story as their encounters with (to them invisible) Jellies cause them to become of interest to Eun Young in one way or another. In the first episode, we meet Oh Seung Gwon (played by Hyun Woo Seok), typified by the little bonnet he always wears on top of his head. He gets stung by something in the first episode and even after getting treated by Eun Young, through him half the school gets zombified. I’m still not entirely sure what happened to him, but he definitely made a strong first impression. Seung Gwon has a crush on a girl named Sung Ah Ra, nicknamed ‘Jellyfish’ (played by Park Hye Eun), who is apparently very popular by other guys in school as well – in the first episode one of the basketball team bully guys is planning a big love confession for her. Ah Ra is one of the students that maintains her sanity during the zombification, and she witnesses first-hand how Eun Young saves the day. After that, she spends a lot of time in the nurse room, even helping Eun Young out with problems regarding other students. Then there’s Jang Rae Di – or ‘Radi’, as her name is derived from the English word ‘radical’. With her characteristically orange-dyed hair, Radi is introduced as an idol trainee who only comes to school every so often. Just like Ah Ra, she quickly becomes accustomed to Eun Young’s ‘line of work’ – she ends up dating Hye Min after they become human and in the final episode she asks Eun Young if she can help out her mother who can see ghosts. Something I found interesting (which now possibly makes sense to me) is that, when all the students were under the influence of the tidal wave in the final episode and looked like they were all sweating pigs, Radi and Hye Min were the only ones not to appear like that. After it’s revealed where Radi’s name comes from and that she even has a tattoo in her neck that says ‘radical behavior’, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe that’s what saved her from the Jellies’ effect in the end? After embracing her own individuality and dating Hye Min even if that meant becoming a laughing stock at school, she didn’t succumb to the effects that the Jellies had on the other students. Maybe this was because by then she’d finally fully embraced her true feelings and chose to break out of the mold together with Hye Min?
Then, there’s Lee Ji Hyung (played by Kwon Ji Woo), the boy who’s bullied by his basketball team mates and receives the ‘magical’ shoes from Mackenzie. In Ji Hyung’s case, his repressed feelings mostly have to do with his suppressed rage towards his bullies. He never openly goes against them, even when they physically abuse him, even after they come back after getting hurt as a result of Ji Hyung’s trick with the Jelly seeds to get back on the team. Ji Hyung is a very mild-mannered boy, but you can see the tension exuding from him. I think he made a very clear example of a different kind of emotion that hung around the school, the emotion of humiliation and frustration – he just couldn’t find it in him to become violent himself but he did take some satisfaction from winning that basketball match because of those new trainers.
Then there’s the two main troublemakers of the class, Heo Wan Soo, nicknamed ‘Lucky’ (played by Shim Dal Gi) and Kang Min Woo, nicknamed ‘Ruckus’ (played by Lee Seok Hyung). Wan Soo always seems to luck out while Min Woo always seems to complicate matters, but still the two are always together. Their connection is proved to be even stronger when Eun Young notices that there’s a navel cord-like Jelly springing from the back of their necks that connects the two of them. Eun Young and In Pyo are ultimately able to make the Jelly disappear by tying the armpit hair of the two – I still don’t understand how exactly this was done – but in the final episode the Jelly returns bigger than ever when the two of them discover the locked basement together. There’s not much explained about their bond or how close they really are and why, but they do get into a lot of mischief together.
Finally, and I just want to mention her because she’s such a peculiar character, there’s Oh Kyung Hwa (played by… Oh Kyung Hwa). She seems to be the girl who always has one-sided crushes and keeps getting heartbroken over them. She has a crush on Ji Hyung throughout the show, but she’s often seen gross-sobbing in the cafeteria over the fact that her crush doesn’t like her back.
All in all I really liked the portrayal of the students, and all the characters in general. In contrast to a regular K-Drama, there was no focus on making people look attractive and this only added to the realism of this surreal show. The skin imperfections, the frizzy hair, the awkwardness in dealing with their emotions and how to present themselves in school or their daily life, every character was flawed in the most human way and it only added to the story. The computer graphics also made some very drastic and occasionally gross-looking changes to the characters’ appearances, and I couldn’t help but respect everyone for even daring to show this side of themselves. There’s this one part where Go Yoon Jung made a guest appearance as the ghost of a girl whose exam seat cushion had been stolen by Wan Soo. She ultimately blew up in size into a larger-than-life sobbing jelly mess before she exploded. Where in a regular K-Drama, she would only be portrayed as the super pretty girl that she is, this show didn’t hold back in completely deforming her appearance through CGI and I couldn’t help but admire them for taking such chances to highlight the multi-dimensionality of their characters, regardless of whether they looked attractive through CGI or not.
One other contrast I want to mention before going on to some more general remarks and my conclusion was the use of recurring animals and symbolisms to refer to the school’s repressive image versus the literal ocean of emotions the students were dealing with. In other words, let’s talk about the ducks. While I knew from the start they must have had some sort of representational meaning, I was still surprised by the matter-of-factly explanation that the ducks merely symbolize the conformative nature of the school. They’re always waddling in a single-file row, following their leader. I remember this one scene where Eun Young and Hye Min were walking away from the school together, followed by the pointing finger of the founder’s statue, and they passed the ducks that were going the other way – as if they literally went in the opposite direction of the conformed mass, and as this was just when they decided to get Hye Min the stomach removal, I think that makes perfect sense now as it was the moment Hye Min decided to break out of their mold.
On the other hand, there’s an immense fluorescent whale (reminiscent of Extraordinary Attorney Woo) floating over the school at night. This ’emotion whale’ seems to be a literal embodiment of the students’ massively surging moods, and this makes even more sense when a literal flood of repressed emotion emerges from the basement in the final episode, like an actual ocean befitting that whale. Or it could be the whale itself, finally letting the water burst out of its back! I find symbolic references and meanings like this absolutely delightful – I just wish I was better at catching them, lol.
I honestly feel like I should rewatch this show in order to improve my understanding of it. If I’d watch it again, even just with the new theories I’ve read, maybe I’d be able to see through the story a bit better. On the other hand, I feel like it also has a lot of references to Korean culture that I simply can’t fully understand as a European person, like the thing with the exam seat cushions and tying Wan Soo’s and Min Woo’s armpit hair. I don’t have enough knowledge of the cultural connotations of the story to understand what these references entail, I freely admit that because it’s the truth.
As reference for my own review – I admit I sometimes read other reviews for inspiration when I have trouble verbalizing my own opinions – I would like to refer to a couple of blogs that give very interesting, detailed and enlightening reviews of this show. Should you want to read more in-depth analyses about hidden meanings and symbolisms that I missed in my review, please check out these reviews:
https://thefangirlverdict.com/2020/12/14/guest-post-the-school-nurse-files-an-alternative-lens/
https://www.dramabeans.com/2020/09/the-school-nurse-files-series-review-part-1/
I find it promising that so many people managed to see the good in this show rather than just brush it off as being way too weird and metaphorical. It definitely deserves an open-minded watch, and sometimes it’s also nice to watch something without trying to put too much meaning to it. It is what you make of it, and I think that’s what can make it so relatable in different ways. It might be an anthem to people who’ve always felt like they didn’t belong, while to others it might feel more like a fever dream. It was definitely a fever dream for me too, but I really tried to concentrate on the message and after educating myself a bit more through other people’s comments, I can definitely recognize several references to contemporary society. I like that it’s so different from a typical K-Drama, as other people have pointed out it definitely suits the Netflix platform very well. I also liked seeing actors that I already knew show completely new sides of their acting, and how everyone really gave their all to make the powerful energy of this show work. It wouldn’t have worked this well without the hysteria, the manicality and the weirdness with which everyone acted. Despite my seemingly lower rating, I enjoyed it a lot. The rating reflects mainly my own lack of full understanding and the fact that I would’ve liked a bit more explanation and closure. There are a lot of things left unsaid and while I can appreciate the charm of the show as it is, I can’t help but feel like I wanted more from it. I really wanted to understand all of it, although I suppose it’s also kind of the point that not everything is explained and dissected.
I liked the music that was used for this show, it really set the series apart from typical K-Drama. The use of eerie sounds and then the Ahn Eun Young-song as a kind of battle theme track heralding the heroine, it really added to the surreal feel of the show and it also stimulated my fascination with what was going to happen next. They created a very engaging soundtrack and I really liked it.
What added to the quirky charm and surreality of the show for me even more was the way in which the episodes were constructed. I think it was a really good choice to refrain from a typical structure, or to ‘conform to the norm’, so to say, but to instead make the events of the story flow into each other in an unpredictable and sometimes even unsettling way. Regular drama series usually have a common storytelling structure in which every episode focusses on a specific character or event, and wraps it up neatly at the end. Here, almost every episode ends in the middle, or right before the climax of the main event Eun Young is dealing with at the time. The arc would be completed in the next episode, and then immediately followed by a new issue which would again, not be solved by the end of the episode. They really keep you hanging, and I found myself going, ‘this cliffhanger is illegal!’ at the end of almost every episode. In my opinion, the quirky nature of the story even came back in the way the episodes were structured, and this also made it very original.
As I mentioned before I found it hard to write proper character analyses for this series, but I will attempt to write a little bit about the main characters as I go through my cast comments.
I’ve only seen Jung Yoo Mi before in the movie Kim Ji Young, Born in 1982. I see she’s more of a movie actress, but she’s done a couple of dramas as well. I will just say that I really liked to see her in such a quirky and unconventional role as Eun Young. Despite being the heroine of the story, she definitely isn’t your mainstream, typical female lead. I have to admit I found her incredibly hard to gauge – every time I thought she was onto what was happening it turned out that she didn’t, and she always needed the help from other people to find a solution for the problem, even though she was the only one who could see the Jellies. In hindsight, the fact that she didn’t always know what to do made her all the more human. It only highlighted the fact that she was no actual superhero, that she was a human being burdened by this peculiar power without knowing everything there was to know about the things she could see. It wasn’t as if having this power her entire life meant that she knew what every single kind of Jelly meant – until the end she didn’t seem to have a clue what they were supposed to be, or even if they were good or bad. She just felt the need to fight them, even if that meant draining her own emotional energy to the max. Despite reading in other people’s reviews about how immensely empathetic Eun Young is, I initially didn’t get that feeling at all. I found her quite socially awkward, not sure how to interact with people or even show them that she cared. I initially didn’t feel as if she personally ‘cared’ as much about everyone at the school, that she was just trying to solve the issue for the general good, but that her empathy towards the students grew throughout the story is undeniable. I think it reached a climax with Hye Min, or even with Kang Sun, even though she didn’t seem that attached to him in the beginning. It literally killed her powers temporarily seeing him pass on, that must mean something. I guess the simple truth about Eun Young is that this strange power of being able to see Jellies everywhere has ostracized her from ‘normal’ people, and that she’s always yearned to be normal, but that she ultimately realizes she can’t escape her fate. She’s a nurse in heart and soul, and in that profession she’s found an invincible need to help people in whatever way she can and she doesn’t even care if she gets credit for it. She’s odd, she’s quirky, she’s manic, she’s lethargic, she’s whimsical, she’s stoic, and somehow she’s all of it at once. I think Jung Yoo Mi did a really good job portraying all those different sides of her, because even though it made Eun Young incredibly hard to gauge, it did make her very relatable as a human being. We’re all messy, we all have different and contradicting sides. It was a very original performance of a very original character.
It was incredibly refreshing to see Nam Joo Hyuk in the role of Hong In Pyo. In the first episode, when he was standing in the back of the class participating in the morning exercise, I just assumed he was another student, I didn’t even realize he was the homeroom teacher. As I saw someone else also point out, seeing him as someone who looked much older than the roles he typically gets cast for was very interesting. We all know Nam Joo Hyuk excels at mild-tempered characters, he just has this easy-going vibe about him which fits him very well, and this is also the case in this show. Despite this characteristic in his acting I found it funny to see him in a permanent state of ‘what the actual fuck’ throughout the story. All the while, his performance was very sincere and it was nice to see how naturally In Pyo accepted Eun Young and her antics, even though he didn’t even know what she was going on about most of the time. I’ve seen Nam Joo Hyuk in a bunch of drama series before, such as 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, The Light in Your Eyes, Start-Up, and most recently in Twenty-Five Twenty-One. I’ve seen almost everything he’s appeared in so far and I still haven’t tired of him – that says something. He truly showed yet another new and incredibly sincere side to his acting in this drama, and I’ve seen multiple people praise him into the heavens for his performance here. Personally, I’d still like to see him in less typical roles, like Weightlifting Fairy. He always gets cast as these timid and melancholic male lead roles while I know he can also portray much brighter characters. In the case of In Pyo, I think we can all agree that his power lay in his silent resilience, and that was powerful in itself, but in terms of casting, I’m always waiting to see something new of Nam Joo Hyuk rather than what I already know he’s good at.
Yoon Tae Oh seems so familiar to me, but I’ve only seen him as a guest role in Arthdal Chronicles (not that I recognized him from there because he played a Neanthal). I also know of that new movie that recently came out, Past Lives, and I saw him in the trailer. Apart from that I haven’t seen anything he’s done and that baffles me because I could swear I’ve seen him before somewhere. I’m going to watch Love to Hate Me, so at least I know I’m going to see him there, but otherwise… Oh, well. I thought Mackenzie was a very interesting character. His intentions seemed dual, like he was neither a good guy nor a bad guy, but because he stood in opposition to Eun Young we as viewers are kind of led to see him as a bad guy, also because of his relations to HSP. I liked how this series played with the relativity of good and bad, both in people and emotions. It gave the story a kind of flawed judgement that made it even more human and realistic. Despite her own perspective, Eun Young can’t blame Mackenzie for doing with the Jellies what he deems right, just as much as Mackenzie can’t blame Eun Young for trying to do something she deems right. I think Mackenzie was a very interesting opponent for Eun Young. While they don’t literally ‘fight’, their respective mindsets alone set them apart and while challenging ech other’s perspectives, they also learn from each other, even if they don’t necessarily act on it. I think Yoo Tae Oh did very well in maintaining that fine line between making Mackenzie a likeable character or not. It gave his character an edge and unpredictability because you didn’t know what he was going to do next. He certainly didn’t let anyone figure out his next move!
Apparently, Hyun Woo Seok was in Love Alarm, but I don’t remember him from there. He’s only appeared in five dramas and three movies so far, and again I’m surprised because he looks so familiar to me. I guess I’m going to have that with a lot of people from this show. At first he kind of reminded me of Suda Masaki. I thought he suited the show very well. I think the challenge with him is that he is the first student we meet to get entangled in a Jelly-case, and this happens before we are actually properly introduced to him. He sets the tone for the students that are introduced after him, but even though he’s the first one we get to know, we don’t learn much about him. Nevertheless, we still grow to like him and care for him as a character, and I think that’s also something the series did very well – it lets us get attached to these characters without even giving us that much information about them. I think this proved how well the characters were written. Although there’s not much room for character development and analysis throughout the story, the characters are all very distinct and well-established. Seung Gwon was without a doubt one of the characters that I grew to like a lot, he just seemed like a really good guy despite not getting much background story. I also thought his crush on Ah Ra was really sweet. It was funny seeing a seemingly introverted guy like him go into that zombified frenzy, he really went for it and I respect that.
Same story with Park Hye Eun, she looks incredibly familiar to me but when I look at her list I don’t see anything I might know her from. She’s only appeared in two dramas and one movie so far, and there’s one upcoming drama. The School Nurse Files was actually her debut! She fitted in so well in the setting of Mokryeon High, I felt no awkwardness in her acting at all and I think she also embodied the weirdness of the show very well. Seriously, I’ve never seen a show with so many psychotically smiling people in it before, lol. I kept wondering about her nickname ‘Jellyfish’, though. They never explain where it was derived from and it doesn’t necessarily sound like a very positive nickname either, even though half the male student body seemed to have a crush on her. I thought it was interesting that they made her such a popular person at school, she was nothing like the typical ‘school goddess’ one would see in regular K-Dramas. I guess it was her quirkiness that made her stand out, and she was also one of the students who seemed completely at ease with herself – which would explain why she was usually not affected by the Jellies as much as the other students were, with the exception of the final episode when she was definitely being affected (that AIDS-comment to Radi and Hye Min was😬😬). I liked her playfulness and whimsicality in portraying a very typical teenager who didn’t really give a shite about anything. One scene where I really loved her performance was when, in the first episode, she was trying to stop Seung Gwon from throwing himself over the rooftop fence. The way she kept clinging to his leg to stop him from climbing any higher, the way she was bawling her eyes out and begging him to stop. It just showed how much Seung Gwon meant to her even when they weren’t together yet, and I thought that was a very genuine acting performance. Ah Ra doesn’t really show the same level of devotion towards her friends in the rest of the show, not to this intense extent anyways, but I did like how she and Radi naturally accepted Hye Min into their group and immediately bonded with them, looking after them when they got menstrual cramps for the first time and everything. She made me want to know more about Ah Ra.
When Radi first appeared I thought it was Joo Hyun Young, but I guess she and Park Se Jin just look alike? Like most of the cast, Park Se Jin only has a couple of dramas to her name as of yet, including a cameo appearance in Love Alarm which I again don’t remember her from. I thought Radi was a really cool, laid-back character. I remember she was also one of the zombified students in the first episode, but by the final episode it seemed like she stopped feeling the effects of the Jellies, so it was almost like she made a reverse development from Ah Ra, who was fine in the beginning but ended up getting affected like everyone else in the final episode. I didn’t even realize that she would be part of Seung Gwon’s and Ah Ra’s friend group in the beginning, but I liked how casual yet close they all were. There wasn’t any room for more scenes of how she got closer to Hye Min, they just declared they were dating and got laughed at and then Radi jumped at Ah Ra for making that awful remark, but other than that we don’t actually see any romance develop between Radi and Hye Min. I thought it would’ve been nice if they could’ve included a little more of that. Also, the way the show ends with Radi asking Eun Young if she can come by her house because her mom needs help with a bunch of ghosts… that just sounded like the perfect way to tease a second season. I wish we could’ve gotten some more info on Radi as well, she seemed like a really interesting person. Also, I thought they mentioned that she was an idol trainee or something, but then it didn’t come back anymore and now I’m actually not sure if I imagined it😅. Anyways, she was a familiar face, I believe it did come in when they were reporting from the hospital after the zombie-incident and the news reporter recognized her or something. Park Se Jin had this super chill energy about her and I think she embodied Radi’s vibe very well.
Kwon Ji Woo is such a handsome guy! He could easily be a model with those facial features, my goodness. Just like with Park Hye Eun, The School Nurse Files was his debut drama, and he’s only been in five dramas so far. I see he’s also in Youth of May, which is on my watchlist, so at least I’ll see him again there! I liked how all the main male student characters were kind of timid compared to the girls. The scene where his bullies made him trip on that treadmill after putting a plastic bag over his head and he fell so hard that his face started bleeding through the bag… that was really painful to watch. Ji Hyung was such a sweet boy and it was really awful to watch how those guys harassed him. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to get some sort of revenge, and even if he didn’t actually mean for something extreme to happen to those guys, it was very understandable that he felt a kind of fierce triumph. When those guys were gone, he finally got his chance to shine, after all. I symphatized a lot with his character, because even though he did that one thing where he basically eliminated his competition and got back at his bullies without having to face them personally, he never became a bully himself. His personality didn’t change despite that shimmer of vengeance he got, and I think that was really admirable about him, certainly when looking at his reputation as a pushover at school. I’m really curious to see more of Kwon Ji Woo’s acting!
I’ve only seen Shim Dal Gi before as the young version of Lee Jung Eun’s character in Our Blues, but there she also made a big impression on me. Hold on, I see now she was also in IU’s Persona drama! I remember that episode and her character there, although I didn’t really know her as an actress then. She was a really good casting choice for Wan Soo, but also for this drama in general. She really embraced the craziness of the show and she got to show a wide range of variety in her emotional acting as well. In contrast to the actors I’ve mentioned before she’s less of a rookie, with already more than ten dramas and movies to her name. I hope she can keep appearing in dramas, also in more main roles, because I really like her energy and how she doesn’t shy away from going the extra mile when it comes to her using her facial expressions.
Not me realizing I’ve actually seen Lee Seok Hyung in several things before this and I still didn’t recognize him😱The School Nurse Files was his debut drama, but he was also in Lovestruck in the City, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha and The Sound of Magic! My memory really needs an upgrade… Anyways, I liked his character, and I liked the chemistry between Wan Soo and Min Woo a lot. There wasn’t anything romantic going on between them (Min Woo also had a crush on Ah Ra), they were just really good buddies. Even though Wan Soo was ‘the smart one’ and he was ‘the more clumsy one’, they never fell out or anything. I thought at first that Min Woo would kind of be the class clown, the one who always got scolded for not paying close enough attention, but even within their group of mischief-makers, no one treated him like he was less than the others. I would’ve liked to get a bit more information on how he and Wan Soo got so close, on how they became Lucky and Ruckus, and while I respect that the series in general didn’t focus on background stories, I was really curious about the navel cord-thing. Why were they tied by that thing, how did they manage to temporarily sever it, and how did it suddenly come back after they discovered that basement together? Would the cord remain or would Eun Young sever it for a second time? I wanted to know what it was about their bond that created that thing, so in that sense a little bit more background story would’ve been nice.
This has been Song Hee Joon’s single drama project to date and I am baffled. I have to admit I developed a minor crush on Hye Min, they’re so freaking pretty! Besides this, Song Hee Joon has appeared in two movies, that’s it. Hye Min was my favorite character in the show. I think it’s because their arc was the clearest to me and I found their connection to Eun Young the easiest to understand. I really liked how Song Hee Joon portrayed Hye Min in their innocent and subtle yearning to breaking out of their mite-eater routine. The scene in the final episode where Eun Young and In Pyo finally drove her* past that 5,38km radius point and she* (*changing pronouns here because by this point she had become a female human being) realized that it actually worked was really touching. I liked how in this one review someone talked about how the reason Eun Young related to Hye Min so much was because their desire to break out of the mold went together with an obligation to still keep performing their duty. Right up until their surgery, which they’d been desiring so much, Hye Min still asks Eun Young, ‘What about the school?’ and this is exactly the same thought Eun Young has when she loses her powers. Although she loves not being able to see the Jellies anymore, the feeling that she is the only one to save the school and whatever is going on there never leaves her, and when she gets her powers back she still takes up her plastic sword again, albeit crying with reluctance. I really liked how they made such a clear parallel between these two, and how Hye Min ended up playing a big part in helping Eun Young come to terms with her own true desires as well. I really hope Song Hee Joon can get more acting projects, she was absolutely lovely in this.
I think that I’ve managed to comment on all the actors and characters that I wished to discuss. Of course there are a bunch of other important side characters that I haven’t touched upon as much, but these were the people that stood out to me the most in terms of performance.
All in all, it was a very unique watch and I’m glad I gave it a chance. It most definitely stands apart from ‘regular’ K-Dramas, it’s more edgy and dark with a lot of cussing and gorey stuff like slime and blood in it, but it’s also fun and refreshing, and the animation and special effects are really good. It has an incredible attention to detail in the tiniest placement of objects and construction of shots. By the fact that Jung Se Rang worked on the screenplay I can only assume that the actors were able to get a lot of guidance from the original author on how to interpret the story and the characters.
It would definitely be worth rewatching, even if it’s just to take in the things I learned after finishing it the first time. One time isn’t enough to grasp everything that’s going on, and that in itself makes it very engaging because it proves just how much thought and effort went into it. It’s just not possible to understand everything in one watch. I do have to agree with some other people that I would’ve liked a couple of more episodes, if not a second season. I still feel like there is a lot to uncover in terms of story and character building, and the way the series ended admittedly didn’t give much closure. It only made me feel like there was so much more to the story and I felt bad that it ended there. Besides that, as I also mentioned before, although I appreciate arthouse-style stuff and shows that are a bit more metaphorical and symbolic, I am someone who needs things spelled out to me. I wish it was different, I wish I was able to grasp things immediately the way they’re intended, but I have to admit that I tend to miss a lot of stuff if it’s not made abundantly clear in words or otherwise. That’s why, even after reading a couple of other reviews, I still feel like I didn’t get everything out of it that I could have. This is purely my personal issue which doesn’t have anything to do with the show itself, but it did affect my experience in watching it a little bit. I couldn’t help but feel a lack of closure at the end and with regards to a couple of the storylines. The HSP remained kind of a mystery to me, just like In Pyo’s grandfather’s connection to everything. I could’ve done with a little more, that’s all I’m saying. But it doesn’t take away that the quality of the show and the writing is very impressive. I really love the fact that every shot and every line is deliberate and well thought through. It may be short, but it’s definitely from a different caliber than regular K-Dramas and I mean that in a good way. It highlights the weird and the quirky as a means to adapt to the main character’s struggle with her own ‘abnormality’, but rather than making her feel like the odd one out, the whole show seems to embrace the extraordinary. As In Pyo so aptly summarizes the entire show in the final episode: ‘It’s better to be weird than ordinary.’ To which I can only say: Amen.
To build up the suspense, I’ve hidden a clue within this review as to which drama I’ll be watching next 👀
Until then! x
