After my second to the last series review, which was the revenge-themed one, I said I had another series in mind with the same theme. This particular series has received a lot of hype from international K-drama lovers and even though I wasn’t keen on watching it due to personal reservations towards the female lead, I finally gave in.
Marry My Husband (2024)
Marry My Husband is a 2024 South Korean Television Series written by Shin Yoo Dam and starring Park Min Young (Kang Ji Won) and Na In Woo(Yoo Ji-Hyuk) as the female and male leads respectively. It is based on a web novel with the same name, which had also been made a webtoon series. It has just one season with sixteen episodes.
Summary of the Plot
The series is originally set in the year 2023 where Kang Ji Won watches her life wither as a terminally ill, gastric cancer patient. With a selfish husband and an even more demanding mother-in-law, Ji Won doesn’t see herself living long. After being asked to leave the hospital since she cannot pay the bill, she goes back home unexpectedly to find out that her husband and her best friend are having an affair. She even hears them contemplating on why she hasn’t died yet so they could benefit from her life insurance and whether or not they should kill her themselves since she was taking too long to die.
Ji Won listens to all of this with a broken heart and confronts the unremorseful duo. She gets into a somewhat physical squabble with her best friend who tries gaslighting her into thinking that everything is her fault. Her husband, flaring up, pushes her onto the glass table, shattering it to pieces and dying almost immediately.
Kang Ji Won wakes up to find out that she’s in 2013, which is ten years earlier and begins to live her second life. And now determined not to suffer the same fate as before, she tries to get her manipulative best friend to take over her destiny and marry her husband instead while also making sure she lives her best life this time around without having any regrets. She meets Yoo Ji Hyuk who unknown to her, shares a similar fate with her. Can they make the most out of their second chance before history repeats itself?
My Review and Rating
Putting my reservations aside, I loved almost everything about this series. I usually approach revenge dramas with a lot of scepticism because many times, while the plot may be good, the implementation of the actual scenes could fail to deliver. However, in this series, each episode brought in new insight that was followed dexterously and impeccably.
I also loved the characters. The manipulative and psychotic best friend played her role so perfectly, it gave me a startling insight into the world of backstabbers, false friendships and wolves in sheep’s clothing. Without mincing words, every character aside from the usual K-drama cliché, interpreted their roles meticulously and made the entire series even with how annoying it was at some point, quite enjoyable.
But of course, there are a few things that grated on my nerves in almost the entire duration of the series. The most glaring to me was on the subject of sexism and misogyny. In almost every episode, certain male characters would make a lot of sexist and misogynistic comments. I didn’t have a problem with it at first because I felt like as with the introduction of a theme, the subject would soon be expounded upon and corrected.
It was saddening when I figured that there wasn’t going to be any correction. So statements like, “That’s why women shouldn’t be allowed to work,” and “That’s how women are...” prevailed a lot in the series and would meet silence or a somewhat amused look like they were acceptable remarks. Up until the end, no one stood up to correct any of the misogynists and it was a pain to watch, honestly.
While I can’t vividly pinpoint any other flaws, this one weighed heavily on my mind which is why I had to bring it up. Overall, from the plot, story interpretation and ending, the series delivered. The suspense was real and at certain moments of discovery, I felt the emotion deeply, which is not something I can say strongly in a lot of movies as they are mostly quite predictable.
Overall, I give Marry My Husband* 4.1/5 star ratings. It’s an intense watch but you’re sure to smile and even laugh at certain places. Totally recommend it to all my K-drama lovers.
Jhymi🖤
Thumbnail from IMDB
