Once We Were Us

A plane lands in Korea but the weather is bad and the passengers are taken off. Eun-ho and Jeong-won are on the same flight. They were together years ago. They have to spend the night at the same hotel. They talk. The narrative goes back: 2008, Seoul. They met on a bus going to their home town. Neither had money; they lived together in a small room, ate cheaply, and thought everything would come right one day. Eun-ho wants to make games. The years pass. One of them succeeds, the other waits, and the relationship cannot carry it. Kim Do-young directs. Koo Kyo-hwan plays Eun-ho and Mun Ka-young plays Jeong-won; Shin Jung-keun and Lee Sang-yeob are in the cast. It is a South Korean production and runs a hundred and fifteen minutes. The film opened on 31 December 2025. The narrative is a Korean adaptation of the 2018 Chinese film Us and Them. Mun Ka-young was named best actress at the 2026 Baeksang awards for the part; Koo Kyo-hwan and Kim Do-young were nominated as well. The narrative runs on two planes of time, with the past given in colour and the present without it. The matter it treats is a relationship that began in poverty coming apart in comfort; the separation has no single cause. The film takes the cost of living in Seoul as a direct subject. The narrative comes close to melodrama and the last section raises the emotional weight. Its limit is originality; the premise is familiar, the adaptation faithful, and the ending where expected. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean melodrama and narratives about relationships. Who it is not for: it is long, sad, and the ending bitter.