[Drama special review] Crevasse

by missvictrix

High emotions and dramatic decisions are the subject of a recent KBS drama special, Crevasse. It tells the story of a woman in a loveless marriage, and what happens when she reconnects with a past colleague. But more than that, it’s a sharp look into her psyche, as we examine her decisions, mistakes, and innermost needs.

 
EPISODE 1 REVIEW

I always seem to start out a drama special review by saying how very different the format is from our standard K-dramas. Rather than sixteen hours, we have only one, which makes for a very different kind of storytelling. Often, I find myself leaving these short drama specials unsatisfied because I wanted a more fleshed out story. I don’t have that complaint with Crevasse, though. Even though it’s short, and tells its story in broad strokes, it was able to paint a very affecting picture of our heroine.

That heroine is WOO SOO-MIN (Yoon Se-ah). She’s been married for a while, and her family is pretty well off. Her husband is high on the corporate food chain, their house is pretty impressive, and the couple is financially able to send their young son to study abroad. As we know, though, this sort of material success can be pretty meaningless when your life is devoid of the things that give it purpose — and that’s the journey that we take with Soo-min.

The drama opens with a beautiful, moody sequence set just before dawn. Soo-min is getting some air on an open balcony and sees a man in funeral garb come out, stand on a bench, and get ready to jump. She lunges for him, pulling him back to the balcony, and for a short and dialogue-less seem, it’s rather arresting.

What we learn shortly after is that this man is IM SANG-HYUN (Ji Seung-hyun), a close hoobae of her husband’s. They are all attending his wife’s funeral. Sang-hyun’s wife died in a car accident, leaving him with a young daughter, and he’s understandably struggling to make it through each day.

Soo-min and her husband visit Sang-hyun at home soon after, and the sight of his suffering arouses something deep within in Soo-min. At first, it just seems like sympathy, and the desire to help him and his young daughter, both of which are easy to understand. Soo-min brings him side dishes, takes care of the baby when he’s in a tight spot with work, and so on. The drama conveys so well how quickly Soo-min begins to adore this little girl who needs her; we see just as sharply as Soo-min does that her own life has been devoid of someone to care for and love for so long.

Soon, though, the relationship between Soo-min and Sang-hyun starts to get complicated. During one of Soo-min’s early visits, we learn that the two were colleagues first, and that Sang-hyun was the one that introduced Soo-min to her husband. We also learn that his wife had been suffering dreadfully from postpartum depression, and this only arouses Soo-min’s feelings even more: she’s confronted not only with a man who’s broken down by grief and guilt, but a little girl who’s never known the full affection of her mother.

The sexual tension between Sang-hyun and Soo-min skyrockets after they’ve shared such deep emotions. In Soo-min’s defense, she is conscious of it, and shows visible restraint and caution at first. But soon, there isn’t much holding them back from an affair.

Yes, this is immoral and awful, and the drama certainly doesn’t pretend it’s anything other than that. But rather than moralizing the affair, this drama is more interested in how it affects Soo-min. For Sang-hyun, he’s comforted and nurtured by a woman he trusts. But for Soo-min, it’s even more than that: she realizes that her recent life has been unhappy and meaningless. And then she finds a sudden surge of both happiness and meaning when there’s a man and child that need her. They need her nurturing, her warmth, and her mothering. This becomes almost an ecstasy to Soo-min, and she doesn’t even attempt to hide the affair from her husband.

Funny enough, she and her husband have been living like strangers for years, but the second he senses something off, he seems to care very much about her actions. He even confides to his dear friend Sang-hyun about his wife’s affair… and this, as it should, horrifies Sang-hyun. He wakes up from the delirium of the affair, and tries to separate himself from Soo-min.

This is where things get really interesting and plumb some new psychological depths. Something has changed in Soo-min, since she’s had this new taste of what it feels like to be wanted and needed. And she totally goes off the deep end.

Soo-min is disraught over Sang-hyun forcibly removing her from his life. When pushed to it, she even goes so far as to kidnap the baby and take her to the ocean spot they once visited as a “family.” The storytelling is just superb here. While the rational/sensible side of the story is certainly Sang-hyun’s (breaking off their affair, trying to heal from his grief and not be a horrible person to his friend), we can’t help but feel for Soo-min, who feels used and abandoned.

Part of why this works so well, I think, is Yoon Se-ah’s great acting, and we see Soo-min move through this section of the story as if she’s in a fog. There’s a glimmer of desperation in her eyes. We really never know how far she will go.

The other part of why this story is so affecting is the direction — it’s quite understated, and always keeps us a few inches away, so that we’re not sure what Soo-min will do next, or what she’s thinking. Is she completely unhinged? Is she absolutely desperate and fearless? How far is she willing to go?

The story reaches quite a high pitch by this point, but it would be remiss of me not to point out that there’s nothing loud or high-drama about Crevasse. There’s no makjang here. For all the drama, it’s an incredibly quiet story.

I really liked how the drama handled its story overall, but perhaps my favorite example of that is with the drama’s theme and title. This element comes together so, so well. During the height of Sang-hyun and Soo-min’s happiness, we watch them one night hanging out on the couch watching a documentary about glaciers. There’s not much focus on the actual content of what they’re watching until later, when we circle back to that scene near the end of the drama, and find Soo-min after the storm has settled.

We’re not exactly sure where Soo-min stands to be honest (such a great use of ambiguity here!), but we know that she’s divorced her nasty husband. It also seems as though she’s given up on Sang-hyun and his daughter, which is good, because she was starting to get a little scary.

It’s at this point that we circle back to the documentary they watched together. We see the footage replay, and the narration tells us, “A crevasse is an open crack in a glacier. This trap was created over hundreds of millions of years.” We see Soo-min, totally transfixed as she stares into the crevasse on the TV — and there’s something so deep and emotional that happens in this scene.

This ending statement the drama makes here is what took me from liking it, to loving it. Soo-min, quite clearly, connects to something in the story of the glacier. It’s as if she knew she was falling into this ancient crevasse at the time, but didn’t have the strength to pull herself out. And so, down she went.

Maybe I love this so much because it’s one of my favorite themes: a main character who gets pulled into some whirlwind that’s almost out of their control, and then has to deal with the aftermath when they’re able to climb out. In other words, it’s not only about the mistake or “fatal flaw” in the classic sense, but about what it looks like when the character realizes their misstep, and has to continue on.

That’s the note on which Crevasse ends. Soo-min understands the crevasse that she fell into, and though we don’t get much exposition on whether she’s happier or unhappier because of it, what we do know is that she’s a different and wiser woman than she was before. Her chaos is over, and she seems to have crawled out of the crevasse.

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