Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love Alarm’ On Netflix, A Korean Romantic Drama Where Phones Determine Who Loves Who

Would you want an app on your phone that told you if someone within a 10-meter radius of you has “the feels” for you? Sounds like it would be fun. But it might also be weird, whether you keep getting a “0” on your Love Alarm or keep getting numbers in the double digits. Do you really want to know? That’s part of the idea behind a new Korean series called Love Alarm. Read on for more…

LOVE ALARM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In Seoul around Christmas, the celebration of the 1,350th day of the app Love Alarm is celebrated by a large heart-shaped cloud with rings around it that attracts a crowd. A young woman walks in a crosswalk and sees someone she has a history with.

The Gist: Four years prior, Love Alarm launched and became immediately popular. The idea is that everyone who has it on their phone will get signaled when anyone with the app within a ten meter radius of them has romantic feelings for them. How the app knows this is unknown, but we’ll just go with it.

The woman in the first scene, Jojo (Kim So-hyun), is in high school; she lives with her aunt and cousin, as her parents are out of the picture for tragic reasons. She’s a popular girl, and has a boyfriend. Thing is, she’s not overly happy with Il-sik (Shin Seung-ho), a judo enthusiast who seems to be more into himself than anything else. Jojo continues to blow him off, citing that she has to work at one of her two jobs: at her aunt’s convenience store or at a barbecue restaurant. Why does she work two jobs? She has to pay the nursing home bills for her grandmother, though she hides that fact from just about everyone.

Lee Hee-young (Jung Ga-ram), a classmate who also works with Jojo at the barbecue restaurant, has a massive crush on her, doing things like following her home on his bicycle. His best friend, Hwang Sun-oh (Song Kang), has just come back from two years doing modeling in the U.S. (yes, he’s just that handsome); Hee-young is the son of the Hwang family housekeeper; they grew up together in the same house, but under very different circumstances.

Sun-oh is fascinated with his friend’s crush on Jojo, so he decides to follow her, too. Mostly, he seems to be fascinated that she doesn’t instantly swoon at his feet because of his looks (let’s say his Love Alarm goes off a lot). One day, he follows her as she walks in a direction that indicates she’s not going home. And, well, let’s just say that by the end of the episode, an honest-to-goodness love triangle develops.

Our Take: Love Alarm was adapted from a webtoon by Kye Young Chon that is extremely popular in South Korea; it’s taken a couple of years to go from Netflix’s original announcement, touting it as their first Korean original series, to finally streaming. Maybe executive producer Jaemoon Lee wanted to make sure he got this right, or Netflix just wanted to time it to a summer release. Either way, the show is a perfectly pleasant Korean romantic drama, even though the first of the ten episodes produced doesn’t exactly distinguish it from some of the other romantic K-dramas we’ve seen.

One of the big issues we have with the show is that, at the outset at least, we don’t know how the Love Alarm app works. How does it know a person in your radius has romantic feelings for you? It’s not like a dating app where you find people within your vicinity to date or hook up with. But that’s not the Love Alarm; maybe it’s designed to sense a quickening of the pulse or some other physiological thing, but for now we don’t have any idea about how it knows you have the hots for someone. We might find out later on, but we’re in the dark right now, and it just makes the whole app superfluous to the action.

What we did appreciate about the show is that it gives its main characters robust backstories right from the start. We know Jojo wants more from her life than she has now, but has to get past the tragedy that’s followed her around. And we know that Hee-young feels like he’ll always be the “maid’s son”, even to his best friend Sun-oh. Sun-oh’s issue is that his mother is a socialite with no nurturing skills, which is one of the reasons why he’s sought out Hee-young and his mother as a surrogate family. He knows how good looking he is, but that doesn’t mean he loves fighting off girls left and right.

But there’s something about this first episode that left us really cold, and we’re not sure if this was just a cultural thing or if it just creeped us out because it was, well, pretty friggin’ creepy. More on this in a second.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: As Jojo and Sun-oh kiss, her voice over says, “If I had Love Alarm on me then, would it have gone off? No. Both of ours would have stayed silent. Because the urge to kiss came before love, for both of us. Like the flash of lightning before it thunders.”

Sleeper Star: Yes, she’s the star of the show, but Kim So-hyun is the most compelling actor to watch. Jojo has so much depth to her, more depth than we usually see in K-dramas, and she plays Jojo’s layers very well.

Most Pilot-y Line: Some of what we see in the first episode, mainly the stalking/following of Jojo by both Sun-oh and Hee-young, wouldn’t fly on a U.S. show in 2019. It’s just too creepy and weird, especially when it feels like Sun-oh corners Jojo in an alleyway and asks to kiss her. His response to her resistance? “Why did you follow me without even knowing what I’d do?” Ugh. This kind of stuff even makes ’80s-era romantic creepers like Lloyd Dobler seem normal by compariston

Our Call: STREAM IT. The love triangle aspect of Love Alarm will keep you watching, even if most of the performances are flat and the whole idea of the Love Alarm doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Love Alarm on Netflix