Eleven years after A Werewolf Boy premiered, I have finally gotten around to watching it. The story felt like a fusion of Harlequin romance and fairytale with a warning. While often predictable it was also enjoyable and addicting.

Kim Sun Yi along with her mother and sister move into a house in a remote rural area. Their landlord is the “slimeball”, Ji Tae. Not long after settling in Sun Yi discovers a feral young man hiding next to a shed. He wolfs down the food her mother gives him. Unlike so many rigid Korean mothers in dramas, open-hearted Ok Hui takes the stranger into their home. With 60,000 orphans from the war, it wasn’t a leap of imagination to think he had been abandoned and left to fend for himself. She gives him the name Cheol Su. Sun Yi takes it upon herself to train Cheol Su like a puppy with good results. “Wait” comes to mean many things as the story progresses. As Cheol becomes more civilized she begins to teach him to read and write. Ji Tae comes to resent Cheol Su’s protective nature whenever he attempts to put the moves on Sun Yi which leads to dire consequences and a bizarre wartime experimentation revelation.

I enjoyed Park Bo Young and Soon Joong Ki’s performances. It was refreshing to watch them when they acted freer and more natural than their more crystallized on brand performances in recent years. Jang Young Nam has great depth as an actress and it showed in this film, too. Yoo Yeon Seok was given the tough job of playing Ji Tae, a character with zero nuance and an animal far more dangerous than a wolf.

A Werewolf Boy was a chaste romantic coming of age tale set in a beautiful bucolic setting. Promises were kept and broken, something unavoidable on the road to adulthood. It veered in and out of fantasy, showing once again that the worst monsters are actually human beings.

10/27/23