Film Review: Love Untangled 고백의 역사 (Gobaekui Yeoksa) 捲捲初戀 (2025) - South Korea
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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A Tangle of Heart and Frizz - There is a moment early in “Love Untangled” when Park Se-ri, a high school student in 1998 Busan, stands before a bathroom mirror with a jar of chemical relaxer in one hand and a prayer on her lips. She is about to wage war on her own hair, that great frizzy mass that she believes stands between her and happiness. The scene is played for laughs, and it is funny, but it is also something more: a perfect metaphor for every teenager who has ever looked in the mirror and wished to be someone else.
“Love Untangled,” is a confection with a surprisingly rich center. Marketed as a sun-drenched summer rom-com, it delivers on those pleasures with a buoyant spirit and a nostalgic soundtrack of yearning 90s ballads. Yet director Lee Na-jeong, working from Kim Soo-yeon’s script, has made a film less concerned with the mechanical pursuit of the boy than with the far more difficult untangling of the self.
Shin Eun-soo carries the picture like a live wire dancing in the rain. As Se-ri, she is a whirlwind of contradictions: bold and theatrical with her friends, yet paralyzed into silence by her crush. She longs to escape the perpetual fishy aroma of her mother’s restaurant, but the unknown terrifies her. Shin lets us watch the girl perform herself—trying on personalities like other girls try on clothes. The performance-within-the-performance feels honest, never arch. When Se-ri grows quiet, watching transfer student Han Yun-seok (Gong Myung) photograph the sea, her stillness carries the weight of oceans.
Gong Myung has the potentially thankless task of playing the “perfect boy,” that emotionally intelligent green flag who seems engineered by the teen-movie gods. Yet he refuses to be merely ideal. There is a late scene with his own family that arrives softly and lands with unexpected force, reminding us that even the steadiest hands are working through their own knots.
The film’s greatest supporting character is its setting. This is not the glossy, neon-drenched 90s of glossy nostalgia; this is the tactile 90s of pagers beeping, of mixtapes recorded with a nervous finger over the radio’s record button, of film cameras that made you wait to discover whether your memories had turned out. Busan’s coastal light bathes the story in gentle warmth, and the production design never winks at us. It simply remembers.
The central metaphor—that we must learn to live with our natural texture, in hair and in soul—is hardly revolutionary. The plot walks familiar paths, and a detour into heavier family drama in the second half slightly overextends the film’s graceful frame. At two hours, it lingers on the shore a touch longer than necessary.
But what remains is the spirit. For anyone who came of age in that analog era, or for anyone who has ever desperately tried to straighten the kinks in their own life, “Love Untangled” offers a warm, knowing embrace. It understands that the most stubborn tangles are the ones inside our chests, and that sometimes the only cure is to let the sea wind blow through them.
This is a small film with a big, gloriously frizzy heart. I wouldn’t straighten a single curl. (Neo, 2026)