Soulmate (2023) Review: A Friendship Drawn Across Decades

Is Soulmate worth watching?

Yes. Soulmate is a tender and surprisingly bruising Korean drama about a lifelong friendship between two women, and Kim Da-mi and Jeon So-nee make every stage of it feel lived in. It resists the easy version of its story, letting love, envy and resentment sit side by side. The reservation is a script that sometimes explains in dialogue what the performances have already made clear, and a running time that could lose a few scenes.

What is Soulmate about?

Mi-so (Kim Da-mi) and Ha-eun (Jeon So-nee) meet as children and become inseparable almost at once. Mi-so is restless and impulsive, shaped by a difficult home life; Ha-eun is steadier and more settled, with a gift for drawing. The film follows them from the happy naivety of childhood through adolescence and into adulthood, as their lives pull apart and back together and they are forced to deal with grief, anger, ambition and love, including the arrival of Ham Jin-woo (Byeon Woo-seok).

Soulmate is directed by Min Yong-keun and is a Korean remake of Derek Tsang’s 2016 Chinese-language film of the same name. It is in Korean, runs 124 minutes and was released in South Korea in March 2023.

Kim Da-mi and Jeon So-nee carry the years

The film belongs to its two leads, and both have to play their characters across a wide span of ages. Kim Da-mi gives Mi-so a wiry, defensive energy: she is the friend who leaves, who laughs too loudly, who hides need behind bravado. Jeon So-nee is quieter but just as precise, making Ha-eun’s steadiness look like both a strength and a trap. The best scenes simply put them in a room together and let years of shared history show in the smallest reactions.

What makes their relationship convincing is that the film allows it to be unflattering. The two women love each other, but they also compete, misread and wound each other, and the script is honest about how a friendship this close can hold grievance for a very long time.

Byeon Woo-seok at the right scale

Soulmate draws some viewers today because of Byeon Woo-seok, but his role is deliberately secondary. Jin-woo matters to the story as a pressure point in the friendship rather than as its prize, and Byeon plays him with an easy, open charm that never pulls focus from the two women. It is the correct balance: the film is not a love triangle so much as a story in which a man briefly becomes the thing two friends cannot talk about.

Jang Hye-jin adds weight in a small parental role, one of several supporting turns that sketch the families shaping each girl without needing much screen time.

Where the drama underlines itself

The film’s craft is strong: the early years have a soft, nostalgic glow, and Ha-eun’s drawing becomes a clever visual thread running through the story, a way for one friend to keep looking at the other. But Min occasionally loses faith in his images. Characters articulate feelings the camera has already caught, and a few big emotional scenes are pushed harder than they need to be, with music and speeches doing work the actors had finished.

At just over two hours, it also has a slack patch or two in its middle stretch, where the back-and-forth of separation and reunion becomes a little repetitive. None of this undoes the emotional pay-off, but a leaner cut would have hit harder.

Who should watch Soulmate?

It is ideal for viewers who love character-driven Korean drama, anyone who has had a friendship long enough to be complicated, and fans of bittersweet tearjerkers that take their time. Viewers who know the 2016 original will find the Korean version close in shape but distinct in texture. Themes include family neglect, grief and emotional pain, with little else to worry about; bring tissues.

If it moves you, try these next:

• 20th Century Girl, another nostalgic Korean story of friendship and first love that also features Byeon Woo-seok.
• House of Hummingbird, Kim Bora’s acclaimed portrait of a Korean girlhood, for a more restrained and precise take on growing up.
• More from our drama shelf, if you want other character studies built on long relationships.

The verdict

Soulmate is a warm, sometimes painful study of how two people can define each other across a lifetime, lifted by two superb lead performances. It overstates its emotions now and then and runs a little long, but its honesty about friendship’s darker corners makes it one of the better Korean dramas of its year.

Rating: 4/5