"My Girlfriend is a Gumiho"

Today I watched the first episode of a series that Netflix calls "My Girlfriend is a Gumiho," but which is also known (in English) as "My Girlfriend is a Nine-Tailed Fox."

I would normally steer clear of so-called "romantic comedies."  However, it wasn't exactly clear to me what kind of show this was, and as soon as I saw that it was not an American TV show--and furthermore, that it was subtitled--I was quite intrigued and watched it with interest.

It's actually a South Korean show.  Netflix has 16 episodes and they are all more than an hour long.  Every now and then, the subtitles annoyed me because they would stick in a parenthesized part to try and explain what the character meant; apparently we English speakers are too stupid to understand by context.  That's only a small quibble, however, and it didn't happen often.

It was funny.  It also had brief instances of terror and looming dread.  It's about a guy named Cha Dae-Woong who is tricked by a supernatural being called a gumiho into helping her escape a centuries-long entrapment.  He subsequently experiences a bad fall which should have killed him, but the gumiho (who uses the name Mi Ho), and who now appears as a beautiful young girl, implants a "fox bead" (or marble) into him using what I can only refer to as a "kiss-like contact" which keeps him alive but doesn't really heal him.

So he's stuck with her.  He wants to get rid of her, but the only way he can stay alive is by having the fox bead within him, and to do that he must keep Mi Ho happy.  Being a fox, she is quite fond of eating meat, especially beef, and at the very beginning of this episode when he tells her he doesn't have any money left to buy her some beef, she suddenly turns from playful to deadly serious and tells him if he doesn't, she will eat him instead.  So you see what I mean by "terror and looming dread."

The episode ends with him basically telling her to get lost and leave him alone, but before he gets on a bus to take him to college, she tells him she will follow him, find him, show him what she really is, take the fox bead from him, "and then you will die."  She does exactly that, and the final scene is of her performing her special kiss to remove the fox bead.

Of course we know that she must give it back, because the series would have ended right there if one of the main characters had died.  I liked it.  I'm looking forward to watching it all the way through.  If you have Netflix streaming, check it out.