Ella de día, otra de noche

Miss Night & Day (2024)

First, I want to pay my respects to real stars of this movie, the caterers. They certainly wiped the plate clean with this one. I have complained before about how Korean dramas get bloated by utterly useless scenes of eating and drinking but, by comparison with other shows, this one, uh, takes the cake. Sixteen fat-saturated episodes of a story that could have been told in 10 or maybe 12 lean episodes instead has a BMI of about 100 and waddles to the finish like the inhabitants of the spaceship in Wall-E. Scene after scene of actors eating not very appetizing food and drinking and getting drunk in ways that almost never serve the plot but rather serve the almighty lords of the 16-episode format. For those of you (and I include myself) who like to, uh, binge watch these shows, you really can fast forward through almost every second of these scenes and you will miss nothing at all.

A pity, really, because the story is quite engaging and the leads appealing and the supporting cast is at best (in the case of those with dramatic roles) wonderful and at worst (in the case of those with comic roles) not too annoying. I actually quite enjoyed the performance of Baek Seo-hoo, playing a top idol who works in a prosecutor's office as a conscript because he is unable for medical reasons to do his mandatory military service in the actual army.

The basic idea is that our heroine is bewitched, possibly by an orange cat, so that at night she remains the comely 28-year old played by Jung Eun-ji who at sunrise turns into the not so slender 48-year old played by Lee Jung-eun, only to resume her youthful self when the sun sets. For reasons that are never entirely convincing, she has to keep this transformation secret but she is rumbled very early on by her best friend, played delightfully by Kim Ah-young, and later by one other character whom I will not identify so as not to spoil the fun. This plot device requires a series of increasingly imaginative and hilarious maneuvers to enable our heroine to avoid detection, even by the K-drama tropeissimo parents with whom she lives (thank goodness, at least in this one she does not have an annoying mooch of a younger brother) and our hero, the rather serious prosecutor, played mostly and mostly unsmilingly by Choi Jin-hyuk, for whom she goes to work during the day and with whom she must interact as a witness and victim (and love interest) but only during the evening hours.

Easily the star of the show is Ms. Lee, who fills her character with spark and energy, even joy; Ms. Jung, by contrast, starts off strong as the hardworking young woman who not entirely fairly keeps failing at her efforts to become a civil servant but too soon devolves into a rather weepy and forlorn figure who constantly makes dumb decisions that seem to validate the judgments of the people who didn't hire her. One always has to be careful - is the problem the actress or the script, especially the plot? Some of both in this case.

The comedy is interwoven with a fairly conventional K-drama story of relatives of the hero and heroine who had gone missing 20 years before and whose psychopathic murderer resurfaces so as to put our heroine and certain other witnesses in danger. All pretty predictable. Perhaps it is not a spoiler to say that the psychopath's comeuppance is not entirely satisfactory, at least it was not to me. I was also a little disappointed at the casual way the curse was eventually lifted, again as you can readily guess it would be, but the ending of the show itself was rather touching.

All in all, a pleasant way to while away a few hours - the key being to having a fully-functioning fast-forward button to speed through the calorie-fest.