K-drama review: Move to Heaven - sentimental Netflix drama starring Lee Je-hoon and Tang Jun-sang

This article contains spoilers.

2.5/5 stars

Move to Heaven, the latest Korean original series from Netflix, goes for the emotional jugular early, often and hard.

Film director Kim Sung-ho, whose work has flitted between genre movies and sentimentalism since his 2003 K-horror Into the Mirror, marks his small screen debut. Lee Je-hoon and Tang Joon-sang occupy the lead roles.

Tang plays Han Geu-ru, who lives with his father Han Jeong-u (Ji Jin-hee). Geu-ru, who is 20 years old and has Asperger’s syndrome, works in the family business, Move to Heaven, a trauma cleaning service that respectfully disposes of the possessions of the recently departed.

One evening after one of their jobs, Jeong-u leaves Geu-ru for a moment but, after collapsing on a pedestrian crossing, never returns. Jeong-u’s will provides for guardianship and the person he selected for the task is Cho Sang-gu (Lee Je-hoon), his estranged ne’er-do-well brother.

Sang-gu has just been released from prison, where he spent time for manslaughter after rendering an opponent brain dead in an illegal cage fight.

When Jeong-u’s lawyer tracks him down, he is disinclined to take up the guardianship, but finding himself in a financial bind and with nowhere to stay, he moves in with Geu-ru, who he’s never met before.

So begins a three-month trial period to see if Sang-gu is up to the task. If he passes, he will gain control of Geu-ru’s comfortable inheritance.

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Given the title of the show and its premise, centred around “trauma cleaners”, Move to Heaven ’s sentimentality is perhaps to be expected.

The show ticks a lot of dramatic boxes, with mental disability, terminal illness and single parenthood all present within the central family – and that’s before we consider their occupation, which gives the show an ever-present pall of death and mourning.

Sang-gu is initially presented as a terrible candidate for guardianship. He smokes in Geu-ru’s house and throws trash all over the place as he embodies the devil-may-care attitude you expect from a bad boy.

But as we know, the badder the prodigal brother/uncle is, the purer his heart is likely to turn out to be.

The show explores different melodramatic stories about the departed clients of Move to Heaven.

These range from senior citizens to murdered women, but two things bind them all together: they’re all noble characters and their deaths are invariably shrouded by a misunderstanding or crime that Geu-ru and his analytical mind must solve.

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Most episodes reach satisfying, if cloying climaxes; one about a young doctor’s closet queer relationship counts as a highlight.

Kim has been equally comfortable directing horror movies and melodramas in his career, but one of his overarching themes has been about legacy and examining what is truly valuable.

Though materialism gets a bad rap in his films, mementos which reconnect characters with their humanity are crucial to his dramatic formulae.

With its bright yellow boxes that house the most important possessions, and thus clues to the true stories, of their late clients, Move to Heaven embodies this formula to a tee.

Take a client in episode three: Lee Yeong-un (Lee Joo-sil), a pensioner with Alzheimer’s disease who is found in a hovel three weeks after her death.

Her son only cares about the cash found under her sleeping mat, until Geu-ru figures out that it was intended for a nice suit she wanted to buy him.

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This story is very similar to that of Kim’s most recent film, Notebook from My Mother, in which a grown man reconnects with his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, also played by Lee Joo-sil, once he figures out the meaning of the recipes in her notebook.

Kim uses a similar scenario to set up the relationship between Sang-gu and his deceased brother Jeong-u.

Sang-gu was stranded by his elder brother for three days as a child, not realising that Jeong-u was indisposed after being caught up in a real-life calamity that shook South Korea in the 1990s. The same disaster is also referenced by Kim in Into the Mirror.

One of the novelties of Move to Heaven is the trauma cleaners, though this is not the first time we’ve seen them in a Korean production – the indie film Clean Up depicted the same line of work, though in a much more sombre and realistic way.

That film also features Yoon Ji-hye, who plays a detective who appears in several episodes of Move the Heaven.

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The character played by Lee Je-hoon, who is currently delighting viewers in the slick action series Taxi Driver, is initially incongruous and weighed down by a silly hairstyle and poor costumes; however, he grows into the role when Sang-gu becomes a fleshed out character rather than a tangle of mismatched stereotypes.

Tang Joon-sang offers a more consistent performance as the well-meaning Geu-ru, an unlikely character ready made for such a treacly narrative.

Move to Heaven can be quite dark and occasionally graphic, which puts it at odds with the calculated nature of its sentimentalism – death here is presented as a momentary mess soon swept away by earthbound angels. Life is seldom so neat and pat.

Move to Heaven is streaming on Netflix.

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.