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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Man In My House" Episode 4

Intriguing parallelisms are the order of the day in this episode of "The Man In My House". First up- what does a proper woman do when a man is too drunk to even walk? Na-ri, for all her obvious enmity with Nan-gil, does manage to do the initially decent thing and only gets up to sneaky stuff later on. Meanwhile, Yeo-joo continues to try and maliciously sabotage Dong-jin's life. I'd feel sorry for him except, you know, the cheating. Exactly what quality of woman was he expecting would agree to cheat on her co-worker?

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The more relevant parallelism, though, is between Nan-gil and Deok-bong. Lee Soo-hyuk was quite well cast, by the way. Sure he's a good actor, but the man has this habit of taking on roles with poorly defined motivation, so I was genuinely surprised to learn that this time, Deok-bong does in fact have a well-developed secret motive. Which in retrospect was so obvious. Who ever heard of a random lawyer helping out women he meets on the street out of the goodness of his heart?

While it's obvious now that I've actually written that down, up until now so much of the focus has been on Nan-gil's transparently preposterous claim that Deok-bong's suspicious behavior has been easy to ignore. It's clear that whatever Nan-gil's secret motives are, they are most likely not malicious because otherwise why call so much attention to himself? Nan-gil is simply too flamboyant to be an effective con artist. He teases women rather than flatters them.

And you know, maybe that's what they deserve. I really like most of the characters in "The Man In My House" precisely because they have these glaring flaws for which they frequently receive direct comeuppance. Na-ri's obsessive sneakiness warrants snark. Deok-sim's obsessive snark warrants a lack of friends. Nan-gil's desire to make friends warrants suspicious looks from other people because who wants friends in this day and age? Family is what matters.

This is also the absolute perfect time for the drama to start introducing its more out-there genre staples, like gangsters and crooked land development schemes, because it really enhances the sense of paranoia. Even if we can mostly accurately guess which characters at this point are of good and bad alignment, there's no way they can make these judgments except by observing each other's actions. And in the long run, actions speak louder than crazy theories.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Man In My House" is directed by Kim Jung-min-XII, written by Kim Eun-jeong, and features Soo Ae, Kim Young-kwang, Lee Soo-hyuk, Jo Bo-ah, Kim Ji-hoon-I and Kim Mi-sook.

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