Animated K-drama Lost In Starlight shoots its sappy love story into space

Despite being partially set on Mars, Lost In Starlight is about space travel like rom-coms from a certain era are about architecture or magazine columns. Though its interplanetary ambitions and soft sci-fi setting allow writer-director Han Ji-won (The Summer) and her animation team to place their familiar love story in a world with a little more visual imagination, this is still the story of a guy and a girl meeting cute, falling for each other, facing a rift, and overcoming their fears. That one of them happens to be a traumatized astronaut—about to follow in the footsteps of her mother, who died alongside the rest of mankind’s first expedition to the red planet—is given about as much weight as the struggles of her love interest, who plays the guitar. This narrative imbalance sends the Korean romance off-course, but at least the casual details that dream of Seoul’s overstimulated future are captivating along its scenic route.

Lost In Starlight imagines 2050 Seoul as a cluttered and warm-hued metropolis, a cramped urban landscape full of drones and transparent layers of augmented reality—a vision of a city between its present-day skyline and full-on Blade Runner, where trees and ivy still grow beneath the self-flying cars and holographic marketing. Throwaway props, like a futuristic Murphy dresser, elegantly add to the atmosphere, while the camera whirls through the bustling streets and stacked neon signage to dizzying effect. It’s this visual pollution that leads to the meet-cute between Nan-young (Kim Tae-ri) and Jay (Hong Kyung): Jay literally walks through a projected streetside news broadcast about Nan-young’s dead mom in order to bump into her.

The connection Lost In Starlight aims to draw between Nan-young’s parents and her new crush becomes even more clear than Jay literally emerging from an image of her mother. It’s been 25 years since the opening scene’s Martian disaster—just enough time for Nan-young to get herself professionally positioned to go up there for round two—but its emotional aftermath remains as visible on Nan-young and her obsessively sky-searching dad as lunar craters, untouched by erosion. As her odds of going on the mission increase, so do the odds of her forming a romantic connection that threatens to repeat history. The central pair also first bond over an artifact left behind by Nan-young’s mom: a broken record player.

Luckily, Jay’s a retro technology enthusiast, an analog guy. He’ll fix the record player, and asks for her name and number using pen and paper. Old school. He even plays the acoustic guitar, eventually revealing that he’s the singer-songwriter behind a since-scrubbed-from-the-net demo track Nan-young’s been listening to non-stop.