Yeon-woo (Uhm Jeong-hwa) is a high-flying, powerful lawyer with a heartless attitude to match. She excels in her work and devotes herself to it entirely, with no time for a boyfriend, let alone a family. Thanks to her skill and hard work, she is invited to work in a very prestigious New York law firm.
But as luck would have it, on the way to the airport she is involved in a car accident.
When she wakes up, Yeon-woo finds herself in heaven. Obviously this is a bit of a shock, and being a lawyer she tries to talk herself out of the situation. But as it turns out, she isn’t supposed to be there after all. Some celestial bureaucratic mix-up has resulted in her being summoned to the afterlife instead of another woman with the same name.
Manager Lee (Kim Sang-ho), the angel in charge, offers to set things right, but there’s a complication. Namely, Yeon-woo must go and spend a month living the life of the woman who was originally slated to die. After the month is up, they’ll be able to arrange for her to return to her old life.
Romantic and family comedies are sometimes criticized for being predictable.
But the truth is that if a film has interesting characters, a well-written script and is directed with a bit of verve, the predictability doesn’t matter. Wonderful Nightmare is one of those films. It’s not hard to figure out what might happen when Yeon-woo suddenly wakes up as an ordinary housewife in an old apartment, married to a public servant with a schoolage daughter and a young son.
But actress Uhm Jeong-hwa (Venus Talk, All for Love), widely considered Korea’s queen of romantic comedy, knows how to bring both spontaneity and wit into familiar situations, and as time goes on we find ourselves becoming more and more wrapped up in her struggles.
The cast around her is also quite good, from the touchingly ordinary depiction of the husband by well-known heartthrob Song Seung-heon, to Kim Sang-ho’s hilariously deadpan Manager Lee, to another engaging and funny performance by Korea’s best known female character actor La Mi-ran, as one of Yeon-woo’s friends.
Wonderful Nightmare is not a high-profile or big-budget production, and so when it was released in theaters in August 2015, most would have predicted it to remain there only a short time before moving on to the IPTV release.
But as it turns out, word-of-mouth on the film was much better than expected, helping it to remain in theaters for a surprisingly long release in which it slowly but steadily built up an audience. It may be that in a year when Korean cinema was skewing towards darker themes and tragic endings, this was just the uplifting, warm-hearted film that viewers were secretly craving.
Writer-director Kang Hyo-jin has an interesting range of works in his filmography, from his start as the screenwriter of My Wife Is a Gangster (2001) to the independent feature Kill Them All with Bare Hands! (2004) and the boxing drama Punch Lady (2007). He’s a director who’s been able to bring out good performances in his actors, and who also knows when to get out of the way and let their acting lead the story.
When it’s all over, the narrative details of Wonderful Nightmare might start to slip from memory, but the image of these characters leaves a lasting impression.
Some viewers might take issue with the film’s apparent dismissal of the life of single professionals – surely one does not require a family in order to lead an emotionally satisfying, meaningful life?
But Wonderful Nightmare does demonstrate how strong connections with others, and being willing to put other people before yourself, can in the end lead to happiness. It was a rare note of optimism in a year of mostly downbeat films.