My Mister review

My Mister is slow, bleak and quietly brilliant, and it asks for three episodes before it pays you back. Lee Sun Kyun plays Park Dong Hoon, a structural engineer in his forties who does everything right and is hollowed out by it. IU plays Lee Ji An, a twenty-one-year-old temp at his firm who looks after her deaf grandmother, owes a loan shark and ends up paid to help get him fired. What grows between them instead is the spine of the show: two people at the bottom of their lives who recognise each other. There is no romance in the way the poster implies, and the show never asks you to excuse anything. IU is a revelation in a role with almost no dialogue, and Lee Sun Kyun makes stillness readable. Park Hae Young's script finds room for everyone: Dong Hoon's two brothers and their stalled lives, a neighbourhood bar full of old school friends, a monk with unfinished business, and office politics sharp enough to carry a thriller. It is funnier than its reputation, and its kindness is earned, never handed out. The costs are real. The first three episodes are grey and slow and easy to quit, and Ji An is hard to like at the start. The brothers and a side romance with a failing actress test your patience, a phone tap does more plot work than it plausibly could, and Dong Hoon's passivity is maddening if you want a hero who pushes back. It is violent in places, and the age gap feels uncomfortable until the show makes clear what this is and is not. Watch it for the writing, the two leads and a drama about decency that never preaches. Push to the end of episode 4. Skip it if you are low and need something light, or if you came for romance.