Spooky in Love Review: Formula Is Doing the Haunting

Cheon Yeo-ri can identify a murder victim because his ghost tells her where the body is buried. Prosecutor Ma Gang-uk reaches the same forest through ordinary police work, mistakes her for a suspect, and soon finds himself wrestling beside a shallow grave while responding officers assume they have interrupted an amorous encounter.

The sequence condenses the entire business plan behind Chilling Romance, also circulated under the English title Spooky in Love: crime for tension, ghosts for spectacle, slapstick for accessibility, and two attractive leads positioned close enough for romance to become inevitable.

Adapted from the 2011 South Korean film Spellbound, the series gives Park Eun-bin the role of Yeo-ri, a hotel heiress and executive who has seen spirits for years. Physical contact carries a further risk. Anyone touching her bare hand may begin seeing the dead figures attached to her, which explains the gloves she wears through meetings, crime scenes, and daily life. Yang Se-jong plays Gang-uk, a prosecutor whose faith in evidence is about to meet a witness no court can cross-examine.

That clash provides a sturdy television engine. Victims bring Yeo-ri information, Gang-uk converts it into admissible proof, and each investigation can move their relationship forward. Netflix has received a supernatural procedural, a chaebol drama, and a romantic comedy in one delivery. Efficiency has rarely looked so haunted.

Coincidence as Infrastructure

The premiere arranges Yeo-ri and Gang-uk’s relationship with the persistence of an algorithm that has already decided what viewers clicked to watch. Their first meeting in the forest occurs by chance. Their second arrives outside a convenience store, where two suspicious men damage Yeo-ri’s car near the restaurant where Gang-uk has been drinking with colleagues. He jumps into her vehicle, orders her to pursue them, and fails to notice that an invisible passenger in the back seat is supplying directions.

The chase gives the episode its clearest picture of how the pair might function. Gang-uk confronts the suspects, Yeo-ri steps in with a baseball bat, and the trunk of their car contains a murdered taxi driver. The victim’s spirit led her there. Gang-uk sees a baffling coincidence; Yeo-ri sees a request completed.

The problem lies in how frequently coincidence must perform the writers’ labour. Gang-uk later identifies Yeo-ri through expensive shoes caught on CCTV, visits Reina Hotel, chases her through staff areas, hides inside a locker, and follows her into her office. Each beat moves the premise into place, yet little emerges from either character’s choices. They remain near each other because the episode keeps dropping them into shared rooms.

Romantic television has always relied on improbable meetings. Here, improbability becomes production infrastructure. By the time Gang-uk catches Yeo-ri from falling and grabs her bare hand, the cliffhanger feels carefully scheduled rather than emotionally charged. The curse has earned its entrance. The romance has not.

The Woman Behind the Gloves

Park Eun-bin finds a sharper drama inside Yeo-ri’s enforced distance. Six years earlier, her fiancé Cha Gi-u promises that her connection to spirits will not frighten him. His confidence collapses after he becomes trapped in an elevator, suffers visions of drowning, and later recoils from her presence. He ends their engagement because proximity to Yeo-ri has made the supernatural impossible to ignore.

The gloves become a practical barrier and a social one. During a hotel visit, a child falls near Yeo-ri, and she cannot offer an uncovered hand. The moment lasts only briefly, yet it carries greater emotional force than the episode’s repeated romantic staring. Yeo-ri does not withdraw because she dislikes people. She fears passing her burden to them.

Her public identity offers no relief. She is the CEO of Reina Hotel and Resorts, surrounded by staff members who call her cold after she leaves their locker room. Her family treats marriage, property, and political access as parts of one corporate calculation. When her cousin Ha-ri asks permission to marry professional golfer Park Seung-jae, Yeo-ri recognises the business advantage and still warns that he is dependent, unfaithful, and dangerous.

Seung-jae has recently escaped conviction for murdering his former girlfriend, a case Gang-uk refuses to abandon. His assemblyman father provides political protection, while the Reina family sees a prestigious alliance. The arrangement places a woman’s possible murder beside another woman’s proposed marriage, then asks which outcome best serves the family enterprise. Chaebol dramas have examined this machinery for decades. Chilling Romance presents it efficiently, then rushes back toward the next ghost gag.

Park keeps Yeo-ri from disappearing into the machinery. Her controlled posture during family negotiations, physical confidence during the roadside attack, and solitary drinking at home suggest a woman who has mastered every room except the empty one she returns to.

Ghosts in the Content Bundle

The dead have a clearer social function than the living romance. They seek Yeo-ri because official systems have failed them. One guides her to a hidden grave. Another leads her toward men transporting a corpse. Gang-uk’s central case concerns a victim whose body and murder weapon remain missing, allowing a wealthy suspect with political connections to walk free.

This gives the supernatural premise a useful political charge. Ghosts become witnesses excluded from institutions built around acceptable forms of evidence. Yeo-ri can hear them, yet her testimony has no legal standing. Gang-uk can prosecute their killers, yet he requires proof stripped of its supernatural origin. Their partnership could examine who receives justice, whose account is considered credible, and how wealth determines the distance between suspicion and punishment.

The premiere remains less interested in that tension than in keeping several genre channels active at once. Gang-uk’s colleagues stage a fake ghost prank after scenes concerning violent death. Family negotiations give way to workplace comedy. Yeo-ri’s traumatic history shares space with a locker-room farce. The shifts are not inherently incompatible, though the editing rarely gives grief enough time to settle before the next tonal instruction arrives.

This is familiar streaming-era television design: every audience preference receives a lane, every episode must advertise several future pleasures, and no mood may risk becoming commercially inconvenient. The ghosts ask for justice. The platform asks them to keep the pace lively.

This South Korean occult romance series premiered on July 18, 2026, and is available for streaming on Netflix. The show follows a hotel heiress who has the ability to see ghosts and a dedicated prosecutor who investigates unsolved murder cases as they form an unlikely partnership to take on the city’s hidden evils.

Full Credits

• Title: Chilling Romance

• Distributor: tvN, Netflix

• Release date: July 18, 2026

• Running time: 70 minutes per episode

• Director: Lee Min-soo

• Writers: Choi Jung-mi

• Producers and Executive Producers: CJ ENM, CJ ENM Studios, B.pic, Sangsang Film

• Cast: Park Eun-bin, Yang Se-jong, Ong Seong-wu