As a film lover who grew up with John Hughes and other filmmakers like him, I was trained from a young age to expect high school to be filled with archetypes: spinsters, popular kids, jokesters, nerds, and humorless, awful authority figures. While we’ve evolved (at least a little) since then, there’s something about some of the now-classic ’80s movies that remain endearing, even if some of the characters and plot details feel problematic or downright silly by today’s standards.
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When I noticed the new Netflix original film “Love Untangled” trending on the platform’s global Top 10 list, I knew I had to give it a shot as a lifelong fan of teen movies. Love Untangled is a high school romance set in 1998 and has all of the character tropes mentioned above, and then some.
The film’s logline explains that it “follows 19-year-old Park Se-ri as she plans to straighten her perpetually frizzy hair before making a life-changing confession while getting involved with transfer student Han Yun-Seok.” From that description, I assumed the film would be a bit like Can’t Buy Me Love — where the protagonist concocts a scheme to gain the affections of the popular kids — and in some ways it is. But I also expected it to stay on the lighter, sillier side. Ultimately, the point of the film is about a teenager’s unruly hair and how it affects her love life, but there’s a lot more depth to the film than you might expect, and the complexity and darker plots more than make up for the film’s more playful aspects.
Park Se-ri (Shin Eun-soo) blames her failure in love on the fact that she has curly hair. Se-ri is a twin, and the unfair reality is that her sister has straight, sleek hair and has no problem hooking up with a boyfriend. Meanwhile, Se-ri remains stationed in the bathroom, trying to manage her mane for hours, blaming her hair for all her problems.
Se-Ri has a huge crush on Hyun, the biggest hunk in school, and would do anything to make him her. But unfortunately, her big hair means he’ll never fall for her – at least not according to the prevailing social norms. Se-Ri and her friends befriend a new kid at school, the quiet and reserved Han Yun-Seok (Gong Myoung), and when Se-Ri learns that Yun-Seok’s mother is a hairdresser, she falls in love with his mom, hoping to get a deal for her services so she can look pretty and impress Hyun.
While Se-Ri does her best to catch Hyun’s eye, it’s the authentic relationship she forms with Yun-Seok that becomes the real romance of the film. Shin Eun-soo is instantly appealing as Se-Ri, who is full of life, charm, and adventure. She’s the complete opposite of Yun-Seok, who rarely speaks, but when he does, it’s with pure honesty and heart. These young actors elevate the film from a sometimes silly, superficial teen romance to something more, especially when the themes later turn darker and we learn how Yun-Seok and his mother came to town. While the first half of the film focuses on Se-Ri’s romantic hijinks, the tone shifts toward the end (and it may leave you completely in tears) as Yun-Seok’s backstage life takes center stage and the gravity of his family situation sets in.
It almost seems unfair that Love Untangled focuses so much attention on Se-Ri’s hair. While it may set the film’s initial events in motion, there’s so much more to it than that. A bittersweet romance that perfectly captures the bliss of high school crushes (and spoiler alert: it does have a happy ending), the film has earned its place in the top ten for a reason. It’s pure, heartfelt magic.
