‘Doona!’: Inside Netflix’s K-Pop Romance Sensation

Netflix’s latest South Korean hit Doona! opens in a dream. A sequined Lee Doo-na (Bae Suzy) falls into deep water, sinking into the darkness below. The light filtering through the water’s shimmering surface displays distorted memories of her past as the lead vocalist of Dream Sweet, a K-pop sensation that surrounded her with dancers, flashing lights, and adoring fans. Then she wakes up in a small, dim room — alone.

This dreamlike quality permeates the nine-part drama. Directed by Crash Landing on You’s Lee Jung-hyo and based on Min Song-ah’s webtoon The Girl Downstairs, Doona! fits a lot into its tight runtime, weaving a complicated yet relatable narrative about loss and love. On the surface, it feels at home with contemporary clichéd dramas yet represents a startling departure.

After Doo-na’s dream, Lee Won-jun (Yang Se-jong) moves into the house, a shy and reserved boy who is so clueless he has no idea he’s living with an erstwhile K-pop idol that gave it all up after the stress of performing non-stop caused a breakdown. Their initial encounters are clumsy yet charged. Won-jun is taken by Doo-na’s forthright, even defensive posture while Doo-na seems intrigued by someone so far removed from her own celebrity. Unsurprisingly — this is a K-romance, after all — it doesn’t take long for opposites to attract.

Their relationship is complicated when Won-jun’s teenage crush, Kim Jin-ju (Shin Ha-young) appears at the university. As Doo-na coaches Won-jun on how to reconnect with his first love, she shifts from possessiveness over her only anchor in her new life to feeling that he will abandon her for Jin-ju. This love triangle, which would be the sole focus of so many other K-romances, is only a foundation upon which Doona! builds its tangled web of relationships.

Doona! is driven by the remarkable chemistry of the series’ three protagonists. Jin-ju and Won-jun’s relationship truly feels like old friends coming together, laced with a careful familiarity that threatens to erupt into intimacy. Doo-na and Won-jun, meanwhile, possess a boiling attraction evident in every stray touch and nervous glance through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

As Won-jun brings Doo-na into his friend group, she begins to address the trauma behind her pop-star exit, becoming more herself as she and Won-jun grow closer.

This is where Doona! shines. With precious little to say about pop-idol culture — which is merely a facilitator for its central romance — Doona! instead builds a community around Lee Doo-na to pull her out of isolation and help her rediscover herself. It’s something South Korean television does so well, seeing community-building not as a means to combating greater evil — a la Stranger Things — but as an antidote to the alienation derived from the systematic rigors of modern living.

Doona! doesn’t quite reach the emotional heights of Park Hae-yeong’s masterpiece, My Mister, and the series retains some of the meandering nature of its source material, especially with the introduction of Choi I-ra (Park Se-wan) as a new housemate halfway through. Nor does it reject the tropes and clichés of South Korean dramas: Doo-na falls into Won-jun’s arms in slow-motion, Jin-ju sports a cute bob only worn by third parties in K-drama love triangles, and the show loves to put Yang Se-jong in a shower. 

For much of the runtime, these clichés are surgically balanced with the show’s main love story. But as we reach later episodes, they multiply. Plus, Shin Ha-young is given little to do in the second half of the series despite her effortless shift from warm third wheel to harrowed and weary abuse victim.

Won-jun starts the show as a refreshingly earnest protagonist, but before long the dreamlike quality of Doona! falls aways and real life seeps in. It’s a surprising and affecting shift, but it brings with it Won-jun’s devolution into a typical male K-drama lead driven by intense jealousy that belies how real and healthy the relationships in Doona! often feel, e.g. when Won-jun, Doo-na and pals drink beer in their shared courtyard or consume a tower of sandwiches. 

Doona! is a show that’s really about letting go — shedding old lives, past loves, and former selves. South Korean romances have a tendency to focus on protagonists with nearly everything searching for that final piece of the puzzle. Doona! deftly navigates the complexities of grief and, though wrapped in K-drama clichés, is surprisingly human.

From Rolling Stone US.