Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Destined With You’ on Netflix, A South Korean Romance Between A Nerdy Woman And A Lawyer Under A Supernatural Curse

A brash, high-powered lawyer’s life has been upended by a secret family curse. After a tragic accident occurs, he meets the unlikely woman who holds the key to breaking it in Netflix’s new South Korean series Destined With You. The show is a wild combination of dark, moody supernatural thrills with silly humor, but somehow… it works?

DESTINED WITH YOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A thunderstorm rages over a mountain. A small, dilapidated building has “Police Line: Do Not Cross” tape stretching around it. Inside a woman’s body is lying motionless.

The Gist: It’s not a dead body we see in the first shot of the series but the very much alive body of Lee Hong Jo (played by Cho Bo-Ah). Hong Jo is a low level civil servant for the city of Onju’s Green Space Division where she responds to the worst complaints the citizens have: she cleans dead fish out of the local ponds, she tries to calm angry residents with noise complaints. While responding to a noise complaint about a construction site working all night, she tries to calm the tension between the workers and their angry neighbors, when one of the men in the construction crew throws himself off the fourth floor and dies.

Six months later, we see a trial playing out and a young lawyer named Jang Sin Yu, played by K-Pop star Rowoon, is defending the construction company in a negligence lawsuit brought by the dead man’s wife. Sin Yu proves he’s clever and cunning, revealing in court that the dead man and his wife planned for him to get injured on the job to collect insurance, and things went awry during his fall. He and the rest of his legal team are ruthless, but his lack of emotion and empathy aren’t his worst trait: He’s plagued by a mysterious curse that manifests in different ways. He has body tremors. When he’s alone, a bloody red hand envelopes his face. It’s not really clear if this curse if truly evil or what, but it obviously haunts Sin Yu every day of his life.

So what brings these two very different people living in very different worlds together?

After a young man who was hiking dies at the site of a mysterious and reportedly haunted temple, Hong Jo goes to investigate the scene of his accident. While she’s there, she gets spooked when she thinks a statue is speaking to her, and she slips and falls, getting knocked out. Sin Yu also happened to be there checking in on it, as his wealthy family owns the shrine and the land it was built on. Eventually, the shrine has to be demolished, but while it’s being torn down, Sin Yu unearths a wooden box buried beneath it. A shaman, a woman who used to live in the temple on the land and obviously knows something about Sin Yu’s curse, tells him that his suffering will end now that he has met the owner of the wooden box. And guess who THAT is…

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? My first thought when watching Jang Shin Yu sitting at the desk in his law firm, enveloped by a creepy, bloody hand, was that I haven’t seen this much supernatural activity in a law office since Wolfram & Hart played a prominent part of Angel. And if I’m being honest, the way this series blends super-serious supernatural threats with lighthearted, almost cheery vibes from Hong Jo’s scenes, it definitely feels, thematically, like an heir to Buffy and Angel.

Our Take: There’s a lot to take in from the first episode alone, but like so many other South Korean series, this one is very slowly paced and thickly layered with lots of side stories, dozens of characters, and a lot of plot to get through. (The first episode is nearly 70 minutes, and there are 15 more episodes in the season to flesh out all the nuances of Sin Yu’s curse, Hong Jo’s barely-touched-on backstory with her cruel boss, and the actual romance between the two).

It’s fair to say that this show is truly all over the place. One moment, Hong Jo is going full Ugly Betty, faceplanting into a bowl of noodles to hide from the cute guy in her office. The next minute, the bloody hand that has cursed Sin Yu snakes it’s way around his throat, as if to choke him. But that’s not unlike many Korean dramas that blend silly with serious, it’s just that so far, it’s hard to tell if this show is veering more toward sweet romance between an unlikely pairing, or a sinister supernatural story in which Sin Yu is bound to suffer for eternity.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Sin Yu finds Hong Jo outside her office, she is distraught having been left out of a group dinner her cruel colleagues had without her. He needs her, and she is desperate for a new friend. He holds out his hand to her and tells her, “I want you to come with me.”

Most Pilot-y Line: “What a unique guy from a unique family,” Hong Jo says when she sees Sin Yu and his family, who are all upper class, dressed in sleek black suits, but somehow deeply dedicated to this shrine in the woods where she watches them praying. Unique is one way of putting it, this shrine definitely holds secrets.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the fact that the show is a mix of a half-dozen different vibes, that’s what makes this supernatural romance it all the more intriguing.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.