ECCENTIC ROMANCE – 2025 – Thailand

BLISS RATING:   ★★★

“I feel in love like you would fall asleep: slowly and then all at once.” – John Green – The Fault In Our Stars

Apparently, this was a series in 2024, but I watched this as a recent movie release. Surprisingly, I rather enjoyed it despite its many flaws. It was quite entertaining and a good “who done it” mystery. It surprised me, actually. It was a good attempt at a BL murder mystery.

It begins with two young men who have been friends for 8 years. One is Sung Hoon (Joon Jun Won) who is a sophomore studying business at the Korean Foreign Language School. The other is Jay (Save Saisawat) a Thai studying Korean at the same School but still prefers to speak in his native tongue. While they are friends, it is becoming obvious that they are falling in love with one another as they constantly obsessed about each other. And they are continuously looking after one another as well.

They are enrolled in what appears to be an ‘easy’ elective health and fitness course. While Sung Hoon works out and is a member of the basketball team, Jay feels like he is in less than perfect shape. Going to the gym with Sung Hoon, he meets a hunky, masculine personal trainer named Jin Wook (Go Byung Wan). Jealousy ensnarls Sung Hoon as Jay seems to be enamored with Jin Wook.

After the usual misunderstandings, they finally realize they are in love and can no longer hide their feelings for each other.

More recently, there has been a local ghastly murder and Jin Wook was an individual who had known the victim. Sung Hoon begins to suspect that Jin Wook could be the murderer.

One of their assignments for their class has them paired up with two other individuals who are friends. One is named Ki Hyeon and the other is Seung Joo (Lee Geon U). Seung Joo is a handsome vlogger and is obsessed with recording everything. The receptionist at the gym, Ji Won (Kim Tae Ha) is also a student at the same school and happens to know these guys as well. Inadvertently, Seung Joo leaves his camera at a meeting at the gym. Ji Won says she will give it to him when she next sees him at the gym. She does see something on the camcorder that might make Jin Wook suspect.

Eventually, the four get themselves involved in trying to solve the murder. Before long Jay and Sung Hoon confront Jin Wook but he confides in them and says he did not kill anyone.  He tries to explain that the victim tried to make advances toward him when he was drunk, but he was simply not into him. They scuffled and he left and worked out at the gym. He showed them the tape of him exercising when the victim was being murdered.  Nonetheless, someone set him up to make it look like he was the murderer.

How it all fleshed out at the end did not completely surprise me yet there was one added twist that did catch me off guard that gave this series an interesting twist to it. I was not expecting it. To say it was cold and calculating is to put it mildly but made for a very entertaining and enjoyable murder mystery.

Who really this movie? this movie? There is some solid acting in this series for what essentially is, I am guessing a pretty low-budget production.  While there is nothing very deep in any of the characters, I was most pleasantly surprised by Lee Geon U as Seung Joo. Handsome and mostly fading in the background with his camera, he was considerably more diabolical. He literally hid behind the camera with his sociopathic tendencies making sure he got the best shot possible. Nothing else mattered. While evincive, it was not obvious, and it caught me off guard. He is a character that, if the movie had been longer, would have been worth exploring in greater detail.

There are a lot of flaws with this series with the most evident being that if they are studying at a Korean school no one spoke Korean. Everyone was fluent in Thai. The two main leads, while adorable, and supposedly knowing each other for 8 years, only seemed to develop their relationship towards the end of this movie. In addition, the ending seemed madly rushed and just a tad implausible but hey overall it is a fun gay murder mystery. There are not many of them around.

Honestly, if it is Saturday night and there is nothing else to watch and you want to ‘veg’ out, make yourself a big ole bad of popcorn and watch this. It is just a fun and entertaining movie.