우재연
| 2026-04-16 11:49:20
(Movie Review) Mismatch
(Movie Review) 'Mismatch' finds light humor in role reversals
By Woo Jae-yeon
SEOUL, April 16 (Yonhap) -- In the comedy drama "Mismatch," Bong-su (Oh Dae-hwan) has long felt like a burden to his family following a failed business venture. With him on the sidelines, his wife, Sung-hye (Oh Yoon-ah), stepped up as the breadwinner and eventually built a small wallpaper company from the ground up.
Now, working under his wife's roof, Bong-su remains seen as incompetent by those around him, including Sung-hye herself, all while secretly clinging to his old dream of making it as a stage actor, one he never got the chance to follow.
One day, an unfortunate accident leaves him with a severe head injury, one that muddles his sense of who the people around him really are. He begins mixing everyone up, mistaking his wife for his daughter, his daughter for a friend, his father for his brother and his brother for his boss.
Treating everyone around him as whoever he thinks they are, the film finds humors in the chaos: Bong-su scolds his father as if he were a disobedient son and hangs out with his daughter's friends as though they were his own.
With his wife, whom he now believes to be his daughter, he becomes warm and affectionate. For Sung-hye, this is a striking change, a far cry from the timid husband she has always known.
Drawing plenty of comedy from the confusion, the film offers both its characters and its audiences a chance to reflect on their relationships with the people they love, and what they might have done differently to get to where they are today.
For those expecting laugh-out-loud humor, however, the film may fall short of expectations, as it leans more toward family drama than outright comedy. Instead, the humor arises not from staged gags or slapstick, but from the natural comedy of these "mismatched" relationships and their reversal of roles.
Actor Oh Dae-hwan, who played a detective in the 2024 crime action "I, The Executioner," showed a different side of himself in this film as a bumbling, slightly pathetic yet soft-hearted family man. Oh Yoon-ah brings to life a tough, resourceful wife who is hard on her husband -- the kind of woman who could easily exist in real life.
A late theater scene, where Bong-su, once an obscure stage actor, takes a small but meaningful step toward rekindling that dream, captures the film's message of family understanding and support for one another's dream. A theater performance unfolding inside a film makes for an interesting element in its own right.
The film, which wrapped production in late 2022, is directed by Son Tae-woong, who co-wrote the script for Bong Joon-ho's 2000 black comedy "Barking Dogs Never Bite" and directed the mystery-horror "Cadaver" in 2007.
"Mismatch" is set to premiere next Thursday.
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