Snowdrop (2021)
Synopsis
The blossoming of radiant first love
Snowdrop takes place in 1987, a pivotal year in South Korean history that included the June 1987 Democracy Movement, a mass protest movement with the purpose of forcing the dictatorship in South Korea to hold fair elections, and the resulting December 1987 democratic elections, which led to the end of the authoritarian Fifth Republic of Korea and the establishment of the democratic Sixth Republic of Korea.
Snowdrop is set in November and December 1987. Lim Soo-ho (Jung Hae-in) plays a graduate student who is found covered in blood by Eun Yeong-ro (Jisoo), a female university student and hides him from the government in her dorm room. However, it is revealed that Soo-ho is not who he appears to be. Against the backdrop of political upheaval, the pair’s story unfolds and the two develop a romantic relationship.
Review
I give it 3 out of 5 stars because it managed to keep me watching the series until the end.
In my opinion, it is quite slow and super dense. This is one of the reasons why I decided to watch the series dubbed into Spanish, so I could watch it while doing other things. Unfortunately, the fact of not seeing it in the original language, and above all, not fully focusing on it, made that scenes that should have destroyed me emotionally, practically slip through me. But… the chapters are more than an hour and a half, perhaps they did not think this so well.
It also didn’t help that I disliked the female lead Yeon Ro (Jisoo) from the beginning. I thought it was just her personality, but I’ve been told that she’s not really a very good actress either 😅. I’m not good at judging this, but I mention it in case someone wants to see it and it’s one of the people who notice right away when someone is not such a good actor.
“If you and I were just ordinary people, what would it have been like?”
Eun Young Ro
Personally, my favorite characters were agent Han-Na and doctor Chung-Ya. Especially when I realized that this last one was Sunny from Goblin. To tell you the truth, the only love story I really enjoyed was Han Na’s.
Your future is whatever you make it.”
Kang Chung-Ya
I can also say that my level of hatred for Bun Ok, the operator of the residence, only grew with each chapter. With this I attest that this woman is an excellent actress 😂.
“I am jealous of them.
Gye Bun Ok
The fact that I wasn’t born into a good family like them makes me angry.”
What to say about the older ones. The politicians and the managers of the residence, all wonderful in their roles. All equally hateable 😂.
“This is the scheme the high-ups of our countries planned for the election. For them to win the election by a landslide, would it be better to rescue all of the hostages and make people happy? Or would it be better to kill all of them and make people furious?”
Lee Gang-Mu
The truth is that I knew that Snowdrop was a slow and rather sad series, but I didn’t know what it was about until I started it. As the synopsis says, it talks about a time in Korea where the North-South conflict was being reflected in the students.
Before looking up the synopsis for this review, I had no idea that the story was based on a real event that happened in Korea (I mean the movement, not the story in particular). I’m not a big fan of politics, especially when you know that the side that is telling the story is going to “look better”, however, this is probably the reason why I kept watching this series. Both Koreas ended up looking very bad. The series basically talks about how politicians become corrupt, and how sometimes power leads them to care nothing about a life as long as they get what they want.
Now back to the drama itself. It’s supposed to be a forbidden romance between a North Korean spy and a South Korean student, who hides him when she finds him injured thinking he was a student protesting. However, he turns out to be a spy and when they are caught trying to escape, he and his team take the entire dorm as hostage.
My problem with this… From the beginning I saw nothing but Stockholm syndrome in all its glory 😅. It took me a while, in fact, to feel something for Soo Ho, because although I understood that he was fulfilling his mission and acting according to what he had learned all his life, I couldn’t stop finding the hostage situation horrible. Was I able to like him? Yes. But they are still far from being a couple of my liking.
Once we’re convinced we’re never going back alive, we’ll blow ourselves up.
Lim Soo Ho
And all the hostages will die too.”
Tell me if that quote is not romantic… 😂
Still, I think it’s a recommendable series. You just have to know what you’re going for when you decide to see it. But it has a good plot, and while there are things I saw coming, there were a couple of plot-twists that really surprised me.
Besides, far from being my favorite series that I was watching, it was the one that most called me to move forward to see the outcome of the story.
What do you think about this series?
[TS_Poll id=”2″]
Bye bye 💕
*When I did this review, this series was only available on Star+ (at least in Chile)*