Is he dangerous or not?
A woman finds a mysterious man interesting when he becomes her best friend’s boyfriend. But what they don’t know is that they’re more connected than they realize. The woman’s brother, who is a cop, is also connected to the two of them, and he doesn’t like the mysterious man. He believes this man is dangerous and that his sister’s life could be at risk, so he’s willing to do anything to protect her.
The Smile Has Left Your Eyes consists of 16 episodes. This is a crime drama with a heavy focus on romance, which surprised me—I thought it would be an even mix of crime and romantic drama. But the main focus is clearly the romantic relationship between the mysterious man and the cop’s sister.
The series is well-acted, and for a Korean TV series, it’s also pretty controversial because of what it implies about the relationship between the mysterious man and the woman who finds him interesting. I’m not going to mention a certain South Korean movie because then everyone would know what I mean. But it’s pretty shocking—though at the same time, I knew it couldn’t be true. This is a South Korean TV series, not a movie. They censor blood and knives in Korean dramas, for Christ’s sake!
The series takes its time building the relationships between the characters, and it does a great job—though I felt it could’ve been four episodes shorter. At times, it feels like it’s repeating itself.
I liked The Smile Has Left Your Eyes, but it has some problems. I never knew where I had the mysterious man. Is he evil? Is he out for revenge? Or is he just a lost, misunderstood soul? That part was interesting and kept me engaged, especially because he seemed so tender with his smile and his eyes. But I didn’t like what happened between him and his first girlfriend—it didn’t make any sense to me. It was cruel and unnecessary, and in that scene, he felt like the devil.
Speaking of the devil, there’s one completely misplaced character in the series: the crazy rich woman. Early on, the series introduces one villain, and then this other villain shows up—and she feels like the devil herself. She doesn’t belong in this story at all. She could have been Al Pacino’s sister in The Devil’s Advocate. She’s poorly written and comes across like an evil Disney villain who just enjoys chaos. At first, she’s a little interesting, but then she hits the red light and turns into a caricature of evil with zero depth. I suppose the message is that wealthy individuals tend to get bored easily.
The cop’s character is also interesting since all he wants is to protect his sister. But what he does to the mysterious man in one episode is totally absurd—he needs to be put in a straitjacket! He was likable until that episode. What a lunatic!
During the final episodes, I kept wondering how they would end the series, and I guessed it about three episodes before the end. And here lies the biggest problem with The Smile Has Left Your Eyes. When you consider how much pain and suffering these characters have endured, you just want them to find some peace. They deserve happiness. And when the series spends so much time building up these characters, only to deliver that ending, it’s a major letdown. Once again, a South Korean TV series stumbles at the finish line with an ending that doesn’t work—it’s just wrong. To be honest, it’s really upsetting. You don’t do that after 16 hours. That’s something you pull in a movie with a runtime of two or three hours. Some will say the ending was fitting. No, it wasn’t. I get what you mean without spoiling anything, but no—it doesn’t work because of how solid the character building was around the three central characters, who had already gone through hell. But as I mentioned earlier, the cop lost a lot of my sympathy anyway after what he did.
The ending sucks! This is a series you’ll never want to rewatch because of how lousy that final stretch is after 16 hours. But I still recommend The Smile Has Left Your Eyes if you like great acting, strong chemistry between the characters, and two very interesting leads. It’s a one-time watch.