Kissable Lips Review – Fleeting Fluff Piece

With eight episodes that are just ten minutes long or even less, the 2022 Korean mini-series ‘Kissable Lips’ is fleetingly fluffy. Actor Kim Ji Woong is 500-year-old dying vampire Jun Ho masquerading as a college student. To survive, he needs to find a ‘pure-blooded’ human, make them fall in love with him, so drinking their blood would turn him into a human too. Unless the English captions were wrong, that’s the plot of the story.

Luckily for Jun Ho, he stumbles upon Min Hyun on campus, a cute pure-blood. But as the two spend time with each other and grow close, Jun Ho is faced with a moral dilemma and mistakes of his past. While the basic plot is interesting on paper, the series just doesn’t have the time to let the characters grow. So it ends up looking like a quick high-school play about two good looking people frolicking around. It’s hard to comment on all the vampire folklore included in the story, because it’s all made up, so applying any sort of logic would be futile. For example, the vampires in the show can play basketball under the blazing sun and they won’t even get tanned, forget burn to their literal deaths.

Kim Ji Woong has a broody handsome face that fits perfectly well with the kind of vampire image ‘Twilight’ fans would expect. In-fact, this is the second time he is playing a vampire lead in a series, he had the same kind of role, just slightly darker, in the 2021 mini-series ‘The Sweet Blood’, which has an eerily similar plot. Actor Yoon Seo Bin who plays pure-blood Min Hyun, looks like an adorable human panda, but cannot emote well or maybe it’s because his character is so naive that his part feels dumb. And while it’s easy to digest that two obviously attractive looking people are quick to fall in love with each other, all the tension & drama that ensues is awkward to watch, because their relationship feels like a one day dating app hook-up turning into a marriage proposal.

‘Kissable Lips’ is made for teenagers looking for some fluffy brainless romance to watch in their free time. The lead couple looks amazing together, too bad the story is too shallow, because despite an emotional climax, most viewers wouldn’t feel a thing, except maybe relief that the show is finally over.

It’s a 5/10 from me.