“Soulmate Inferno” 
Catherine Choi: There’s a new dating show out there unlike anything before it, where five boys set out to find their soulmates—one where the topic of jobs leads to exchanges like, “What do you do for a living?” “You first.” TOMORROW X TOGETHER’s online series “TO DO X TXT,” now more than 171 episodes in, has spawned “Soulmate Inferno,” a mash-up of “Single’s Inferno,” “I am Solo,” “EXchange” (aka “Transit Love”), “Fortune Tellers’ Love” (aka “Possessed Love”), “Better Late Than Single,” and countless other dating reality shows. The nonstop barrage of parody is powered by the banter of a group that’s spent seven years together and knows each other far too well. “He sure looks like seafood, chopped. Is that your type?” “Wasn’t there a foreigner?” “Wayne Rooney?” Even the subtle rivalries and sizing-up that define shows like this turn into jokes at each other’s expense where nobody holds back. And TAEHYUN and YEONJUN’s backstory as a longtime couple who, it turns out, spent so much time together that even a 330-square-meter X room wasn’t big enough, starts to sound oddly plausible. “Soulmate Inferno” borrows the format of a typical smash-hit dating show, but it gets a brand-new story out of a group that already knows every last detail about one another.

Consequently, “Soulmate Inferno” keeps serving up scenes you’d almost never see on another dating show. BEOMGYU exposes a scheme that was hatched before a vote about first impressions when he shouts, “Hey! We agreed to pick each other!”—as HUENINGKAI, the “foreigner” who’s presumed to have never dated, brushes him off and picks someone else. The two follow an enemies-to-lovers arc, starting out rocky but growing more in sync by the day—or as BEOMGYU puts it, “Even in the middle of all this chaos, love was blooming.” SOOBIN and TAEHYUN, meanwhile, are shamans under the protection of the spirit of an old woman and go from love at first sight straight to being a couple—even if it means the spirit plays third wheel. Then there’s YEONJUN, who picked TAEHYUN in the first installment, “Soulmate Inferno,” and becomes the unexpected lead of the second, “Transit Soulmate.” The twist is that the two were exes who came on the show to find new partners, so the storyline that seemed to have ended in the first part picks up again in “Transit Soulmate,” as the title hints at. YEONJUN keeps his cool and focuses on his meal even while watching TAEHYUN and SOOBIN spending time together, then sends him off with, “I hope things work out with SOOBIN,” and, “Let’s both be happy.” Left alone in the X room, though, he cries out TAEHYUN’s name and breaks down in tears. The room is still full of memories the two made together as part of the group. In real life, they spent years side by side as colleagues. Thanks to techniques pioneered by “EXchange” and parodied here, that history’s turned into memories of a romance that lasted a long time, taking a bit written for laughs and making it feel strangely real.

From love at first sight to hate that slowly gives way to love, and from reunions with old flames to transiting to a new partner, the many ways relationships form and evolve on dating reality shows have become a set of tropes so many viewers now know by heart. Even with all those familiar scenarios jumbled together, watching the group throw themselves into every single one of them with a straight face is unbelievably hilarious. HUENINGKAI and BEOMGYU arrive on Paradise and instinctively take each other by the hand with a “let’s go, babe.” Over a meal of jjajangmyeon, the rest of the group riffs on the spot about how the spirit of the old woman that SOOBIN’s shaman character channels has climbed up onto YEONJUN’s shoulder. You can barely tell what’s scripted and what’s ad-libbed, which is why “TO DO X TXT” can still come up with new material 171 episodes in. Having recently celebrated their seventh anniversary, the group has both seasoned polish and undimmed passion, and fans wouldn’t miss that for anything.

“Possible Love”
Nam Sunwoo (“CINE21” reporter): Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a documentary filmmaker focused on workers laid off from SP Heavy Industries, has a hunch. Her instinct says she can draw a meaningful story out of Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), frayed by the fallout from the fight, and his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), who’s been his rock all the while. She furnishes the two with meals, drinks, and even a couples’ vacation, with her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) in tow. The couple went to school together in ritzy Apgujeong, reconnected while studying in the US, and got married. Sang-woo calls Ye-ji’s interest in Ho-seok and Mi-ok “method acting,” but she’s only doubling down on her creative resolve. “I’m … trying to love those people,” she says.

The two couples appear to live at opposite ends of the class divide, but they actually break down into four wholly separate people. Ho-seok hunches over, having lost his comrades, while Mi-ok, who has a secure job at a mask factory, keeps her distance from the foreign workers on short-term contracts. Sang-woo has enjoyed generations of family wealth, whereas Ye-ji is self-conscious about having grown up with parents who ran a dry cleaner’s. More unsettling than that spectrum, though, is the juxtaposition of desires between the one filming and the one being filmed. Ye-ji focuses her lens on other people’s pain and sometimes can’t hide her overzealousness, much like Mi-ok and her excitement at becoming the camera’s subject. The sequence where Ye-ji films Mi-ok’s workplace is a prime example. While Ye-ji glances around for a shot worth taking, Mi-ok, as if returning the favor, suddenly stages a scene in which she forms a union at the factory.

Director Lee Chang-dong had reportedly been working toward a film about a laid-off worker for years but wasn’t entirely sure what it should look like. It wasn’t until his co-writer, Oh Jung-mi, suggested it be framed from a documentary filmmaker’s point of view that he realized it could reflect his own experiences and the idea that would become “Possible Love” took shape. In effect, Ye-ji is a stand-in for Lee’s viewpoint. It must’ve been a gamble to acknowledge that while also highlighting the naivete of the group of people Mi-ok stands with. That makes it an even more bitter pill to swallow that the film tries to show how art seeks out pain and vice versa. And the movie packs plenty more punch where that came from. The revered director’s latest film opens in select theaters on September 23 and arrives on Netflix on November 6. Stay with the moonlight in the final scene as long as you can.

“Spinning in the Plane” (Agenda & whyahyun)
Na Wonyoung (music critic): The single album “Spinning in the Plane,” a collaboration between alternative R&B artist Agenda and garage house producer and DJ whyahyun, distills the strengths of the two artists’ releases from last year, “i’ve got a lot of things to do” and “CRUNCH,” into two songs, “Liar” and “Whatever.” whyahyun’s beat mixes four-on-the-floor with breakbeat with precision, going for both velocity and intricacy at once with expertly arranged twinkles of sound. Agenda’s voice fits right into place on top, belting out a hook that wraps right around the listener and humming instantly captivating toplines. The pairing is pure listening pleasure.

The single refines the duo’s first collaboration, “gill,” into something more straightforward, and supposedly it takes cues from 2000s rhythm games, which I found interesting. If anything, “Spinning in the Plane” sounds like a modern reimagining of the music that might have drifted out of an arcade back when they had EZ2DJ machines installed. A big share of pop in the 2020s has been about retracing the ground of the recent past—not as it’s actually remembered, but in the way people want to remember it. You can hear the same retro moves at play in this release. Music critic Hwang Sunup has similarly talked about how the sound Tomatomat’s after “isn’t so much the real deal as an image pulled from memory, summoned back for the present day,” treating the style “not as a genre per se but as an attitude and a means in service of achieving a goal.”

What makes this single even more interesting is how much you can feel SUMIN’s approach to songwriting in it (Agenda’s said before she’s a fan of SUMIN and looks to her as a role model). This year alone, the same pop-craftsmanship of obsessive precision in both sound and structure could also be heard in 1:1:1’s single “For Real?” and Labäda Bu’s self-titled EP. Could it be that the once uncannily good way of drawing up future potential in pop music is now being used to reinvent the past but with a completely different way of remembering it? On “Liar,” the vocals are tuned to specifically enhance the beauty of their artificiality, while the drop and chorus are packed with a wall of sound. “Whatever” lays bright MIDI keys over a nimble two-step beat, putting a shiny coat of paint on a nakedly old-school pop melody. The two songs remix the “good old days” exactly the way we’d like to remember them. Maybe this is exactly the version of the early 2000s that we crave so badly here in the 2020s. We’re fine with a fake take on reality. There’s something plaintive in the lyrics, though, and they may be speaking to a time that we now gussy up at will to suit our tastes: “Those memories that came with the feelings that used to torment me / They’ve all turned into whatever now, haven’t they.”