[HanCinema's Film Review] "A Year-End Medley"

There are a lot of characters in "A Year-End Medley" by which I mean more than you can probably reasonably keep track of. But the most important is Jae-yong (played by Kang Ha-neul) who turns suicidal after failing a civil service exam. After being comically dissuaded from his first two suicidal ideas, he decides to live his final week in luxury at a hotel. Most of the other characters are involved, however peripherally, into trying to trick him into staying alive.

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Soo-yeon (played by Lim Yoona) is a possible exception. It's not clear she's actually aware of the plot, it's just that her job is doing wake-up calls, and the two have great rapport over the phone. Most of the storylines in "A Year-End Medley" are cute like this. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say most of them would be decent romantic movies as a sole concept. But the omnibus film gets the job done, seamlessly transitioning from one hotel adjacent love story to another, brimming with cheesy sentiment.

Perhaps the cheesiest is the one between the hotel owner Yong-jin (played by Lee Dong-wook) and the lowly housekeeper I-yeong (played by Won Jin-ah). From the very beginning, Yong-jin is charmed by I-yeong because her name in Korean can literally be parsed as two-zero. Yong-jin loves even numbers, and also his employees, and also his guests, and also his hotel. Lee Dong-wook is so handsome and sweet it's easy to overlook the fact that technically he's engaging in sexual harassment.

Other stories are slight and tangential to the point of almost being parody. Take I-kang (played by Seo Kang-joon), a popular singer and his manager Sang-hoon (played by Lee Kwang-soo) who's suffering from feelings of inadequacy. These two are total dudes, or bros, or dudes, or whatever. So it's easy to overlook that they have almost no interaction with the other characters, in a movie that's already comically long but doesn't really overstay its welcome.

After a certain point it's actually a bit charming, trying to figure out how exactly every character at the hotel manages to interact with every other character. Our nominal lead So-jin (played by Han Ji-min) is such mainly because she has arcane interactions with nearly every other character, what with her being the hotel manager. But she's an easy character to root for, even if her own romance only starts with the credits in which she somewhat hilariously solves the mystery of the inexplicably handsome yet lonely bachelor.

The wordplay in "A Year-End Medley" is often quite charming, if nearly impossible to translate. The movie's filled with romantic teasing, even with the characters who seem old enough to have grown out of it. Yet it's our youngest character, So-jin's little brother Se-jik, who must be directly instructed to seize the moment and be as romantic as possible as now, before he's had time to regret it".A Year-End Medley" is a hard movie to dislike, just due to its sheer sincere sentiment, even if it's far from high art.

Review by William Schwartz

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"A Year-End Medley" is directed by Kwak Jae-yong, and features Han Ji-min, Lee Dong-wook, Kang Ha-neul, Lim Yoona, Won Jin-ah, Lee Hye-young-I. Release date in Korea: 2021/12/29.