By Arissa Binte Kamaruzaman (24A01A) 

Awash in the nostalgic, pastel tones of a film camera, the ‘Queen of Tears’ introduction sequence tricks you into thinking that this is another K-drama fairytale: the cold chaebol-princess falls for the suave lawyer-prince. 

Minutes into the sequence, cracks crystallise—spelling a dizzying shift from young love blossoming in Germany’s tulip gardens, to that of the guilty silence between strangers who now sleep in separate rooms. 

Here is a troubled marriage at its worst: Hae-in, CEO of the Queens department store, makes quite the entrance in her stylish stilettos, yet struts unfazed past her husband, Hyun-woo, whose wearied eyes betray the double miseries of his work as head of Queen’s legal department and go-to attorney for Hae-in’s family. Forced not only to share the same home, but the same office, these two estranged souls seem bound for tragedy (it gets worse when you add their awkward employer-employee relationship into the mix). 

A fairytale wedding

There goes Hae-in’s innocent promise to Hyun-woo: “I will never make you cry when we’re married”. In the same vein, ‘Queen of Tears’—which sets the highest record of TVN viewership ratings to-date—is worth the tears you’ll unconsciously shed at every twist and turn, traversing what it means to fall out of love and fall in love again. 

Broken Promises 

Even as Hae-in and Hyun-woo’s love slips into indifference, the show artfully balances humour and tragedy—steering away from the pitfalls of melodrama (or rather, K-trauma). 

From the get-go, we witness the everyday pains that the couple withstands, not just through their silent encounters at home, but their chaotic workplace feuds. The two never miss a chance to get under the other’s skin, going so far as to relay caustic exchanges through their secretaries. It’s a battle of wit and temper, ever entertaining when both Hae-in and Hyun-woo are clearly competent at their jobs. 

Think hardwired, legal machine with a prestigious, SNU law degree versus the CEO close to earning her coveted spot in the Trillion Won Club. One can’t help but believe that their intellectual sparring may have once been what attracted them to each other. Now, it has turned into the very thing that breaks them apart. 

A living Devil Wears Prada vs her top attorney husband. 

A K-drama isn’t a K-drama without a soju-induced confessional. I love how ‘Queen of Tears’ turns this into a comical exposé of Hyun-woo’s misery in marriage. Gone is his calm exterior, as he lays bare every despair while downing copious amounts of drink. The actor—Kim Soo-Hyun, who previously starred in hit dramas like ‘A Love From the Star’ and ‘It’s Okay Not to Be Okay’—has a babyface that makes it impossible not to laugh when Hyun-woo wails in a manner utterly uncharacteristic of a grown adult. 

Still, his qualms are not without reason, when it’s revealed that throughout his marriage, his legal skills have been exploited to cover up his in-laws’ shocking scandals, against his better conscience. 

It’s funny, yes, but also, quietly heartbreaking. He falls out of love not because he can’t endure all this, but because he’s hurt at Hae-in’s cool indifference. ‘Queen of Tears’ gets falling out of love quite right. While big fights can force wedges between two people who love each other, what’s worse is when they no longer want to fight for each other at all. 

Fake-Dating, but Make It Fake-Marriage

The show’s first critical standpoint is when Hyun-woo, wrist carefully hiding a painstakingly-written divorce letter behind his back, is met with news more shocking than what he was about to deliver: Hae-in has only three months to live. 

He crushes the letter and draws her into a swoon-worthy hug, giving us pause to think that perhaps, dire straits makes for a change of heart.

Unfortunately not. Ever the lawyer-by-training, he feigns charm for a twisted, ulterior motive. What assures him is the knowledge that if he waits out another three months, he’ll be a widower anyway, sans divorce. 

If you’re a sucker for the fake-dating trope, you’ll find yourself enamoured by their adamant, two-way denial of feelings. Like a teen grappling with a first-time crush, Hae-in subconsciously replays Hyun-woo’s chivalrous act of saving her from a wild boar, and even decries how his flirting makes her heart flutter, “Don’t tell me you didn’t dry your hair because you looked in the mirror and thought you looked like a drenched Timothee Chalamet or a young Leonardo DiCaprio!” 

Likewise, Hyun-woo cycles through the rain-slick pavements of his hometown, Yongdu-ri, in search of a lost Hae-in, who’s been slowly losing grasp of her memory due to her condition. He can convince himself all he wants that he’s only waiting for her to die, but there’s nothing more telling than how his eyes soften as he glances at her mud-trodden feet and bruised ankles, and weighs in the visceral fear in her voice. 

Hyun-woo walks away in anger, when Hae-in refuses to tell him what happened to her. 

The camera shifts to the wedding ring clasped so firmly around her trembling finger, like an oath, as she admits nervously: “The truth is I don’t remember. I don’t remember why I was there. I was in front of your house, and then suddenly I was somewhere else. I don’t know when I went here or how…”. An oath that tethers the two of them to each other as street lamps mystically flicker, painting the street they stand on with starlight-esque gold. 

Sanssouci, The Palace of No Worries

In one of the show’s most heartstopping scenes, Hyun-woo makes the grandiose move of flying to Germany to accompany Hae-in as she finds out whether she’s able to undergo a life-saving surgery. No, he doesn’t catch her at the airport—like the rom-com protagonist miraculously does—but he does catch her—even more miraculously—along the idyllic, spiralling stairs of Sanssouci palace, where they once set foot four years ago during their honeymoon. 

In French, Sanssouci means “a place of no worries or tears”, but witnessing the two of them articulate how they’ve hurt each other throughout their marriage, makes one wonder whether such a place exists in reality. Marriage is a tightrope of miscommunication, but their forlorn gazes become a language of their own, one of withheld yearning and long-deserved apologies. 

Along the halfway mark of the stairs, they tiptoe at things they once swept under the carpet, like how Hyun-woo confronts: “You promised not to make me cry…But guess what? I cried while driving, washing my face, and [even] at the car wash. I liked sleeping by myself so that I could cry myself to sleep”. Despite nursing these unhealed scars, Hyun-woo confesses that he intends to stay by her side, what more when she’s faced with a life-limiting illness. 

A tearful reconciliation. 

It is here, where Kim Ji-won, starring as Hae-in, makes an especially heart wrenching performance. She breathes sincerity into a line powerful in its simplicity: “Did I ever tell you not to?” 

Nevertheless, the hurt doesn’t end here—for the episode that begins with them treading honeymoon paths morphs into a dead end, when Hae-in learns of Hyun-woo’s crushed-up divorce letter. After a reckoning of heartbreak, integrity, and age-old miscommunication, it takes a few episodes more before Hyun-woo finally wins back Hae-in’s heart. 

When City and Town Collide

The revenge subplot of this show reaches its climax towards the middle, when the villain, a vile woman by the name of Mo Seul-Hee, cunningly earns the power of attorney of the head of the Hong family. She exploits it to oust the Hongs out of their CEO positions and worse, kick them out of their own home. 

At this point, it’s K-drama-meets-Schitt’s-Creek, when the rich and mighty are bizarrely thrusted into the quaint hometown of their ex-son-in-law—their silk blankets replaced with bamboo mats, and branded slippers carelessly stuck in cow dung. 

Hyun-woo’s family (above), contrasted against Hae-in’s family (below). 

While it’s rare for K-dramas to humanise a conglomerate family, ‘Queen of Tears’ gives even the most obnoxious of characters, like Hae-in’s parents, a chance at redeeming themselves, and changing for the better. 

It’s touching to see how the mothers and fathers of both Hae-in and Hyun-woo, find time to have a heart-to-heart, breaking away at the tensions that once existed between them when the two got married. Hyun-woo’s mother, in particular, offers kindness towards the woman who once haughtily dismissed her son’s suitability for Hae-in. She unquestioningly pays for her coffee when her credit card declines and teaches her the apple-picking ways of the village. 

Awkward conversations at the dinner table. 

Even more promising is the romance that blossoms between Hae-in’s aunt, Beom-ja, and a villager called Eun-young. She’s a divorcee who’s been unhappily married three times and is ever dramatic as she mourns her father’s ailments along a sidewalk in Yongdu-ri. On the other hand, he’s a man who’s been single his entire life; his only companion being his dementia-ridden mother. Their encounters have the magic of opposites-that-attract, like his shy offering of home-made madeleines when she waits outside his home, clad in well-tailored silk that’s clearly out of place in the countryside. 

My favourite side-character, though, is Soo-cheol, Hae-in’s younger brother. Though he is the show’s comic relief, lacking in both gravitas and intelligence, the show turns him into someone unexpectedly endearing. 

It’s in Yongdu-ri, where he reunites with his beloved wife, Da-hye—who had earlier abandoned him to conspire with her mother, Seul-hee—in a tearful hug, eyeing his innocent baby boy, carried in a podaegi on Da-Hye’s back. His unwavering loyalty makes him a worthy father figure to a child that he raises as his own, even when he knows that the child isn’t his by birth.

Yongdu-ri’s riot of colours. 

But most importantly, Yongdu-ri, with its hopeful backdrop of snow-capped mountains and serene sunsets, makes for a perfect site of reconciliation for our main couple. 

Hae-in chances upon a familiar matte pink MP3 player in Hyun-woo’s drawer, inscribed with the initial ‘H’. Just imagine: a boy falls for a girl who drops her MP3 player on her way out of the school gates; and in his determination to meet her again, keeps it like a talisman in his childhood drawer. 

Cliche, perhaps, but what’s not to love? Their young meet-cute reminds me of the cheeky, rhyme-flowing lyric from Taylor Swift’s So High School: “the brink of a wrinkle in time/ bittersweet sixteen suddenly”. 

Bittersweet Endings  

My heart aches as Hyun-woo, drunken once more, whispers religiously as he picks out each leaf on a broken branch, “She likes me, she likes me not.” He smiles when he reaches the very last leaf, ending on “She likes me”, only to follow up with an unabashed confession: “It’s not like that for me, though. I love her. I love you, Hae-in.” 

What he doesn’t know is that Hae-in’s ears are pressed to the door, drinking in every word. While there are small gems like these that boast raw sincerity, the ending of the show, I must admit, tapers off from where it began. 

The plotline takes on a predictable turn, navigating the loss of memory and illness in the usual, tear-inducing ways one would expect it to. The number of times the characters end up on the hospital bed may be too bitter a pill for some viewers to swallow. 

Still, I think it’s salvaged by the fact that the actors have a way of making every tearful scene effortlessly raw and real—mastering the art of crying, if you will. 

For me, though, the hospital scenes are quite beautiful to watch, drawing shocking parallels when Hae-in goes for her surgery to remove her tumour, and when Hyun-woo has to go for surgery after saving her from a gunshot. They take turns being strong for each other, holding on to each other’s hand like a prayer just before the other has to be rolled away on the stretcher into the operating room. 

The only thing that really irked me was that the villains, Seul-hee and her son, Eun-sung, were impossible to sympathise with. Seul-hee, fiancee of 20 years to the elder Chairman Hong, is a force to be reckoned with, for infiltrating into a chaebol family and gaining the trust of their most influential member is no mean feat. She claims that her sole purpose at doing so is to inherit wealth for Eun-sung, to make up for all the years she had abandoned him in childhood, having come from a low-income background. Just like his mother had forged ties with the Hong family, Eun-sung grows closer to Hae-in through helping her secure an investment project. 

The ones behind it all. 

However, Eun-sung had the same cold, calculating look from the show’s start to end, with the only thing vaguely sympathetic about him being the fact that he loved Hae-in and wanted to protect her. It didn’t help his case, that every time he tried to show his affection towards her, his steely eyes made him appear more like an obsessive maniac, than someone with the capacity for genuine, human emotion. 

On the other hand, Seul-hee’s only redemptive moment was one brief, guilty look in the car mirror, reflecting the blurred ghost of her son, yet even that quickly dissipated once she cunningly consolidated her plot against the Hong family. 

It’s a pity that for all the rich, generational trauma enclosed in their memories of betrayal and loss, these two characters were reduced to nothing but money-crazed frauds. 

Queen of Joy 

The show’s finale dances along the steps of Sanssouci palace once more. Every step here is music. The bright tunes of young love slips, momentarily, into strained silence, and then flutters to a crescendo, when Hae-in and Hyun-woo reclaim what it means to live, to love, and to stay alongside each other. 

Return to Sansoucci. 

Just like Oscar Wilde’s “Happy Prince” who lived within the spires of Sansoucci, the couple’s final waltz up these stairs echoes the reality that true joy is found not from abstaining from tears, but rather, from wilfully swimming through the floorless depths of one’s heart—even the parts that bleed.

For all the tears it made me shed, ‘Queen of Tears’ proves to be a tender tribute to life itself, and the very people that make each moment worth witnessing, in full colour and clarity.