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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Girl Who Sees Smells" Episode 1

Cho-rim (played by Shin Se-kyung) is a girl who ends up having a very bad day. From the start "The Girl Who Sees Smells" doesn't do a lot to get on my good side. I'm really not a big fan of the whole "master criminal who succeeds mainly by dumb luck and no one paying attention to him" trope, and here it's a pretty essential part of the premise. Granted Cho-rim is just a high school girl, but even four years ago Korea had CCTV and they must have been running at least a couple hundred meters.

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But even once all of that is out of the way "The Girl Who Sees Smells" isn't all that inspiring in terms of simple characterization. See, Cho-rim dreams of being a comedian. Why she dreams of being a comedian is a very good question, because as far as I can tell Cho-rim gets all of her kicks from using her super-powered sense of smell to solve mysteries and basically act as a human bloodhound. That's about as far off from being a comedian as possible.

In meta terms too, though, "The Girl Who Sees Smells" isn't really all that funny, mainly because the comedic timing is awful. Leading man Moo-gak (played by Park Yoo-chun) appears to have a problem with narcolepsy that could have been funny if it had actually been built up to. Likewise, I could not for the life of me figure out why a late sequence features Cho-rim in disguise until a few seconds after the drama finally got to the punchline.

This is really more the fault of the direction than anything else, because we keep getting misleading cues as to what information is important. When the opening shot of the final chase area shows people of mixed genders, we really need some kind of visual clue to denote that the action has moved into a gender-segregated area. And how in the world did a mix-up result in Cho-rim getting the handcuffs?

These issues are, by and large, mostly just kind of tiring. The only real constant thread I've noticed in "The Girl Who Sees Smells" is that all of the characters, be they criminals, cops, or smell-seeing girls are fairly incompetent at whatever their chosen work is. The drama isn't explicitly terrible or anything, but to date I'm rather unimpressed with what I've seen. Hopefully there will be some swift improvement.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Girl Who Sees Smells" is directed by Baek Soo-chan, written by Lee Hee-myeong and features Park Yoo-chun, Shin Se-kyung, Namkoong Min, Yoon Jin-seo, Kim So-hyun, Choi Tae-joon, and more.

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