REVIEW: ‘Marry My Husband’ Pulls Out All The Stops

The use of time travel as a trope to re-write past mistakes upon death is a familiar one in webtoons and KDramas. Being able to live life differently than the previous is a seductive lure. It is something many viewers can relate to. Who among us doesn’t live with regret about our decisions?

Adapted from Sung So-jak’s novel of the same name, Marry My Husband uses this trope and twists it, using revenge as the driving force for our protagonists’ motivations. It’s not just a matter of living life differently. It’s a matter of circumventing a catastrophic fate delivered by awful people. With this motivation at the heart of Marry My Husband, this latest KDrama pulls out all the stops to keep viewers hooked, sometimes going a little too far in the process.

Marry My Husband starts with a terminally ill Kang Ji-Won (Park Min-Young) receiving cancer treatments. She has lived a difficult life, and now she is facing a difficult end. Her unemployed husband, Park Min-Hwan (Lee Yi-Kyung), is abusive and deeply in debt.

Before her cancer diagnosis, Ji-Won spends all of her time working and catering to her husband’s and her mother-in-law’s every selfish need. While receiving cancer treatment, she is told she either needs to pay the bill or leave. Ji-Won leaves the cancer facility and has a surreal, eye-opening experience in a taxi cab. It’s a brief glimmer of hope before her world crashes around her.

Upon entering her apartment, Ji-Won discovers her best friend, Jung Soo-Min (Song Ha-Yoon), in bed with Min-Hwan. The betrayal is overwhelming, and the situation escalates into a physical struggle. Ultimately, it results in Min-Hwan murdering Ji-Won. This sets up Ji-Won’s desire for revenge when she accidentally wakes up 10 years into the past.

Given a second chance, Ji-Won will do everything she can to pass her original fate onto Su-Min. In the process, she finds true friendship, comes into her own, and – ultimately – finds the best partner she can ever have in General Manager Yoo Ji-Hyeok (Na In-Woo).

Marry My Husband immediately sets the stakes with Ji-Won’s plight. Portrayed by the forever likable Park Min-Young, it’s difficult not to be swayed by her circumstances. Her pitiable state fosters empathy that easily makes the audience cheer her on throughout the course of her journey.

Even when she gets down on Soo-Min’s and Min-Hwan’s levels, it is understandable. Park Min-Young undoubtedly shines in her scenes. Ji-Won’s situation provides many opportunities to play around with Ji-Won’s behavior and dynamics with other characters. This is particularly noticeable when she is face-to-face with Soo-Min.

In comparison, Ji-Hyeok has a harder battle to win over viewers. A fairly unremarkable personality, it takes time for Ji-Hyeok to step out of his own stasis finally. But because Na In-Woo plays Ji-Hyeok with great restraint, he struggles to stand out among his colleagues onscreen. When Ji-Hyeok conquers the PTSD surrounding his first death, that is when the character’s personality comes into full bloom. Free of fear and death, Ji-Hyeok becomes the man he is meant to be.

Marry My Husband shows that sometimes, second chances are all for payback.

None of the revenge would feel so sweet without the horrendous Soo-Min and Min-Hwan. The awful characters in Marry My Husband are truly awful, but almost all of them are grounded due to the nuances found by their respective performers.

More often than not, because of their personalities onscreen, Song Ha-Yoon’s Soo-Min and Lee Yi-Kyung’s Min-Hwan stole the attention away from Ji-Won and Ji-Hyeok. But that’s part of the brilliance of the characters. Their more charismatic personalities and manipulations of people enabled them to get far in their first lives. Seeing Soo-Min and Min-Hwan unravel into the ugliest parts of their personalities now that Ji-Won and Ji-Hyeok know their tricks is TV acting gold.

Marry My Husband spares no expense with its plot twists and cliffhanger episodic endings. How screenwriter Shin Yoo-dam takes Sung So-jak’s original novel and adapts it is no easy feat. Keeping track of all the various changes and choices made by the characters and how these choices alter the future of primary and secondary characters in the series is dizzying. But everything ultimately comes together, with the drama bolstering the results.

The usage of foreshadowing in Marry My Husband also proves to be the series’ blessing and curse in some ways. The series’s foundation lies heavily in time travel, so foreshadowing is prominent here. Ji-Won and Ji-Hyeok frequently reference past instances in order to tackle changing their fate. The editing bouncing back and forth between 2013 and 2023 works well here. That said, the foreshadowing and the first episode’s setup make it easier to predict where the story goes, which makes some twists less rewarding once finally revealed.

However, the series gets too close to the sun here in the drama department with the inclusion of Oh Yu-ra (Kwon Bo-A). Yu-ra’s appearance reads as forced rather than a natural part of the story. Particularly after the conclusion of Soo-Min’s wedding to Min-Hwan, the decision to input Yu-ra then and there feels like it was made for unneeded drama rather than something necessary to the story. As such, it results in the most awkwardly executed drama in an episode before the flow naturally rights itself. For a series that embraces foreshadowing as a tool for what is to come, the ball gets dropped hard with Yu-ra.

While others online have maligned Kwon Bo-A’s acting as Yu-ra in Marry My Husband, her performance is not entirely her fault. However, her performance likely could have benefited from more levels. Yu-ra, as a character, is the least developed compared with other characters in the series. Even characters who receive less screen time, like Min-Hwan’s mother, benefit from flashbacks or exposition to fill in the gaps for who the character is. With her sudden appearance at the end of Episode 11, she is at a disadvantage. No one can deny, though, that viewers quickly grew to hate Yu-ra’s blatant villainy.

Revenge and villainy are the core of Marry My Husband.

From beginning to end, Marry My Husband is a revenge story. But most importantly, it is also a story that reminds us to live our lives to the fullest. We see this through Ji-Won’s and Ji-Kyeok’s journey throughout the series. In their first life, they both lived how they thought others wanted them to. This left both feeling unfulfilled and unhappy. Through their journey and their pursuit of their goals, they learn what it means to have a happy life.

Through Soo-Min, Min-Hwan, and Yu-ra, Marry My Husband shows us that living a happy life cannot be achieved dishonestly. The need to tear others down does little good because it always catches up. Even in the first life, we see how Soo-Min’s and Min-Hwan’s actions haunt them in Ji-Hyeok’s recollection. The pursuit of happiness cannot be built on the bones of others. Bones have a way of unearthing themselves over time, and when they do, there are severe consequences. Marry My Husband‘s final episodes solidify this lesson.

Marry My Husband is a messy, heartfelt, tearjerker of a series. Park Min-Young’s Ji-Won is so relatable and easy to root for, while Ji-Hyeok proves to be the romantic partner that many dream of. With villains you can’t help but hate, and its instant hook of an opening episode, Marry My Husband, will keep you on edge from beginning to end.

Marry My Husband is streaming now on Prime Video.