18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Forbidden Fairytale: bubbly Korean sex comedy is close-minded and prudish
Published: 11:15am, 18 Feb 2025
2/5 stars Just weeks after steaming up our screens as a sultry siren in the erotic thriller Hidden Face , actress Park Ji-hyun is back in Forbidden Fairytale , but her role here could not be more different.
In this bubbly and lighthearted romantic comedy from director Lee Jong-suk ( The Negotiation ), Park plays Dan-bi, who works for the government's Youth Protection Team, reviewing an endless stream of hard-core pornography.
By night, she dreams of following in her late father's footsteps by writing wholesome children's fairy tales.
Following a traffic altercation in which she damages a publisher's vintage car, Dan-bi is cajoled into penning sexually explicit adult fiction to pay for the repairs, and inadvertently becomes an overnight sensation.
Forbidden Fairytale wields its amusing premise with plenty of enthusiasm. It is also crammed with so many wild subplots and side characters that it might have worked better as a K-drama series, where its tangle of convoluted ideas could have been fleshed out more coherently.
