I am not going to spend much time on a review for this bizarre, otherworldly drama, Light Shop (December 2024), because I really disliked it. Just a fair warning up front. If you want a more in-depth review please look for one elsewhere. Thankfully the drama was short, at only eight episodes of less than an hour each, so I watched it in one day. I decided to complete it, even though I thought it absurd, because I admire several of the main actors in it from other dramas, such as Ju Ji Hoon (watch him in Trauma Code instead) and Park Bo Young (watch her in Melo Movie instead). Their performances here were fine, rather it was the writing by the webtoon and screenplay creator Kang Pool that made little sense to me. Perhaps the fault of some of that could be attributed to whoever wrote the English subtitles for Disney+: for instance, in a drama about lost souls caught between life and death, the word "afterlife" was used, when obviously, symbolically, the writer meant the light shop was located on a dark street in the Catholic created "purgatory" (a place which doesn't exist in the Bible -- in Scripture one either goes to heaven or to hell when one dies, depending on whether or not one believes in Jesus as Savior), and the souls who visited this shop were largely dead souls, or those about to die. A cheery subject for a drama, right? ;)

The Story:

A mysterious man wearing sunglasses, named Jung Won Young (Ju Ji Hoon), runs a brightly lit up lighting store but it can be seen only at night on a dark city street. (The set design kept giving me vibes back to 2015's Late Night Restaurant). Visitors who enter the store at various times in the night all seem disturbed in some way. Soon we learn why: most are patients in comas in the nearby Eugene University Hospital's ICU unit, where a dedicated nurse named Kwon Young Ji (Park Bo Young) works the night shifts and takes care of them. Turns out she has a special affinity for them because she too, earlier in her life, had been in a coma and knew the heartache it caused for them and their families. Sometimes she can even see their ghosts! (Odd that Ju Ji Hoon and Park Bo Young had no scenes together in the drama - I would have liked to have seen one, at least).

Most of the ICU patients had been people involved in a terrible bus accident on a bridge, where the bus driver, Oh Seung Won (Park Hyuk Kwon, Goodbye Earth) had ignored the fact that the bus needed its skittish brakes attended to and it ended up plummeting into a river during a bad rain storm. Other patients had been in other accidents, like a building collapse. Their souls visit the light store and try to find out why they are in such a sorry state, but the quiet Jung Won Young doesn't seem too curious, he just wants them to avoid touching the lights in his store!