"Melancholia" is silently impressive. If you're just looking for a sweet romance, you'll be disappointed. Still, the story is a tribute to love. It's also about school, education, South Korean madness about education and the market around it, the arrogance of the top 10 percent of society, as well as bullying and intrigues for optimal certificates. Altogether it´s ambitious in several respects.

"Melancholia" is about the love for mathematics. Mathematics is for the protagonists what notes are for music lovers or colors for artists: a way to capture and express the beauty behind the beauty of life and the aesthetics of life on this planet. In "Melancholia" there are two people (and actually two more) who recognize this beauty with their mathematical 'sense organ', feel it deeply, understand it, and want to delve even deeper - thus see and meet each other and understand how they feel inside.

"Melancholia" refers to "Melancholia I" - one of the three master engravings by Albrecht Dürer - mentor and student look at it together in the context of the story and communicate about it, understand it, and doing so get closer. The Dürer artwork is an allegorical composition peppered with geometric elements and symbols. There are a wide variety of interpretations in the professional world. The two protagonists in the KDrama are inspired by this and enthusiastically help interpret. In connection with "Melancholia I" by Dürer, his sentence "But I don't know what beauty is" has also been handed down. This creative crisis, through which every creative person (whether mathematician, artist, etc.) has to go through at some point, is processed in the KDrama in its own way - in the first half the male protagonist and in the second half the female protagonist is struck by this question. Individually both are thrown off track and have temporarily lost sight of their joyful creative power. They inevitably stand in the face of melancholy - to some extent a dark, black tunnel, that opens up the passage to a new, luminous dimension of their creative power.

With regard to the student, the first half of "Melancholia" focuses on a variation of Weltschmerz, which is at the same time an expression of suffering from the beauty of the world. The protagonist can't help but see this perfection of aesthetics in everything everywhere. And yet he is alone in this. He cannot convey his perception, cannot share his experience with his fellow human beings. That's way too high for the others. Family, friends and even some teachers cannot relate or really understand what he is about. Some of his classmates may misunderstand him as a show-off and envy his genius. In fact, he suffers from the loneliness in which he is stuck. Not the beauty of the world. Yet all this changes after he meets a mentor who in the face of his 'brilliance' isn't (like many others) out for her own gain. Rather, she recognizes his rare ability of perception and gives it a grounded direction. She did not promote the genius, but the human being, who should not exploit his talent, yet learn to enjoy it. The mere experience that he is not alone with his way leads him out of his suffering. This is how he finds his place in the world and no longer has to withdraw and hide from it.

However, "Melancholia" also shows the mentor as she herself is stuck in an aloof, depressive phase. The motive is the same: also lonely, isolated, trapped in her feelings that she cannot share with a world that cannot understand her. And this time it is her student who can remind and encourage her to step outside and back into the world.

"Melancholia" is a hymn to higher mathematics, with which the beauty of life finds an abstract form(el) - but also to art, which tries to aesthetically translate the formulas and mathematical knowledge into new colors and new forms.

"Melancholia" is a homage to the love between two kindred spirits who recognize each other in their kinship and can't help but love each other (selflessly and unconditionally).

But "Melancholia" is also one of many stories in the shade of a brutal South Korean education industry that unscrupulously rides on the hopes, fears and worries of parents and students and repeatedly bears the bitter fruits of bullying, abuse, meanness, despair and fraud produces. In this context, a variation of it is once again told in an exciting, at the same time moving and excellently staged manner.

Finally , this story of the two main protagonists is both a new edition and a contemporary free reinterpretation of the relationship between of two historical mathematicians: the Tamil Srinivasa Ramanujan and the British Godfrey Harold Hardy. The KDrama refers to the extraordinary, intuitive mathematical skills of the historically real Tamil math genius, who was professionally recognized and promoted by the British Hardy. In 1913 Ramanujan came to England under the wing of his mentor and subsequently became known for several important discoveries. It is said that when asked what his own greatest contribution to mathematics was, Hardy said without hesitation that it was (his mentoring for) Ramanujan. He described their relationship as his only romantic experience in life. And with that he refers first and foremost to the very special form of eroticism of their shared, highly concentrated, soaring flights of intellect. Anyone who has never had this experience of a shared 'Eureka' will probably struggle with the romance aspect of this KDrama. Everyone else might experience it differently... .