Say You Love Me is not a Kdrama I’d recommend to anyone. I think the writer said, “Hey, let’s make a show where we show how sex can ruin people’s lives.” Now, don’t get me wrong, there are NO sex scenes in this show, it just talks about what can happen to people when they don’t control their sexual desires.
One of my favorite actors stars in Say You Love Me – Kim Rae-Won! He is the one and only reason I continued watching it. I had a heavy feeling watching this. It took a lovely, uniting thing like sex and showed a debase, ugly side of it.
So here’s what happens… Kim Byung-Soo and Suh Young-Chae have grown up together and are so much in love that you could say they are an emotional and spiritual extension of each other. Cho Yi-Na is a bitter woman who has never had the kind of love Byung-Soo and Young-Chae share, and she desperately wants to destroy it. Byung-Soo is handsome and tender-hearted and she can see he knows how to love purely so she sets her sights on him. She sets up a situation where she and Byung-Soo can be alone and seduces him. It is implied he is a virgin, keeping that part of himself for Young-Chae, and he feels sick that he didn’t control himself and gave into the temptation of Yi-Na. He even goes so far as to confess his deed to Young-Chae’s father who then, literally, beats him as punishment and makes Byung-Soo vow to remain true to Young-Chae and never let her know of his unfaithfulness. Unfortunately, evil Yi-Na sets up another situation for Byung-Soo to fall, and fall he does. I guess the taste of forbidden fruit was too good to stay away from. Maybe he thought, if it already happened once, a second time wouldn’t make the first any worse. In order to keep Byung-Soo from going back to Young-Chae, Yi-Na lies and says she’s pregnant. Byung-Soo is too honorable to leave Yi-Na alone to raise his child so they become a couple and he is miserable every second he’s with her. Young-Chae is miserable without Byung-Soo and Yi-Na is miserable with him because she knows he doesn’t love her and is just going through the motions out of a sense of duty. Can any happiness come from all this misery? You’ll have to watch it to find out, however, I recommend you don’t. It’s too depressing to spend 15 hours on.
Kim Rae-Won plays the part of pitiful Byung-Soo. The guy begins the drama a happy man but quickly becomes a depressed, wretched human being after falling into wicked Yi-Na’s arms, twice.
Yum Jung-Ah plays Cho Yi-Na and she did it well because I hated her! She was wonderful in the role of an evil person void of conscience.
Kim Sung-Soo’s character is the man in love with Yi-Na. He’s bad because she’s bad but could be a good person if he was with someone with a kind heart.
Yoon So-Yi plays the role of naive Suh Young-Chae, the love of Byung-Soo’s life. She’s far too easily influenced by others and a bit on the wimpy side.
Music and setting didn’t stand out. For me, I think everything was pretty much masked by all the depression in the show.
As I was telling a friend about what a bad Kdrama Say You Love Me was and how rotten it made me feel, they brought up a good point I had never thought about – if watching the drama was able to bring out such negative emotions in me, it really was a very GOOD drama. When I thought about it I realized they were probably right. At the beginning of this review I stated that I felt the writer just decided to write about how sex can make people’s lives miserable when it’s not contained within the bonds of love. If that’s truly what the writer was trying to say then that goal was certainly achieved. And the acting and characters had to be great in order to bring out those negative emotions in me. So, I guess I’m correcting myself and saying it really was a well written and finely acted Kdrama, yet, even after admitting that, I still didn’t like it at all.
This drama made me, during the time I was watching it, loose hope in mankind being anything other than bad. If you look at the promotional picture representing Say You Love Me you’ll see four people, two men and two women, and not a single one is smiling. That pretty much shows you how dark and depressing this Kdrama is. A picture of frowning people is worth a thousand words.
Score: 4
The Good:
Kim Rae-Won
The acting
The Bad:
Heavy, depressing feeling throughout the whole thing
Heart and Seoul 