Buried Hearts (2025)

Park Hyung Sik Deserved Better — And So Did We

🛑 Spoilers ahead. This review is entirely based on my personal opinion. If you feel differently — that’s totally valid. But if you’ve watched this show and felt even half of what I did, you’ll get why this review exists. Also, yes, there’s a chance I spiritually slept through this drama, but the way these plot points were handled... I doubt I missed anything better.

Buried Hearts (2025) is a drama that had all the right ingredients — secret births, betrayal, generational trauma, murder, chaebol dysfunction, memory loss, and cliff accidents. Sounds like a classic makjang, right? But instead of delivering a gripping mess, it gave us a confused, emotionally inconsistent ride that tried to be everything and ended up being... not much.

Let’s start with Huh Ildo. This man quite literally drove Dongju off a cliff, murdered his ex-lover and best friend, and spent 99% of the show embodying pure villainy. And yet, the moment he finds out Dongju is his son, we’re suddenly expected to feel sympathy for him? Worse — they hand him a redemption arc, letting him die while saving the very son he tried to kill. Why? Either let him sit in the rot of his own guilt — haunted by the lives he destroyed — or commit to the villainy and let the audience hate him all the way through. Don’t throw us this diluted “I saw the light” redemption at the last minute. Not after everything he did. Not even close.

Seonu’s arc was all over the place — from laid-back illegitimate son to a shady schemer with barely any real progression. His mother’s shift from tragic figure to manipulative enabler made no sense either. And Eunnam’s mother? She literally had her lover killed and walked away without a hint of remorse or consequence. Just... moved on. Where was the emotional payoff?

Speaking of Eunnam — she was never held accountable. The writing gave her a tidy redemption arc without making her earn it. Her motivations might make sense on paper, but her actions didn’t. She chose revenge over honesty, over love, over basic communication. And somehow the show still wants us to root for her? Sorry, I’m not buying it. Add to that her acting, which felt flat during key emotional moments (possibly more a script issue than performance), and it was hard to stay connected to her.

This is not the kind of “soulmates through pain” story we need in 2025. Trauma isn’t romantic. Betrayal doesn’t equal fate. Life doesn’t work like that, and dramas need to stop acting like it does.

Dongju’s arc, ironically, made the most sense. This man has been through it — birth mom dead, adoptive mom dead, adoptive sister dead, love of his life betrays him, birth dad turns out to be his worst nightmare, and everyone he trusted either lies to him or dies. His decision to leave at the end is one of the few moments that actually felt earned. And I would’ve loved that moment… if they hadn’t ruined it with that one unnecessary kiss scene. Seriously — why are you kissing someone who literally slept with you the night before and married another man the next afternoon without ever revealing her true identity to you? Eunnam chose revenge over him every time. So why the fairytale closure?

And then there’s Taeyun — the ultimate tragedy of the finale. Born into a family of murderers, blamed for sins he never committed, constantly trying to be kind to both Dongju and Seonu — and he’s the one who dies. Seonu kills him while Dongju’s already gone. Really? He’s the one you kill? Not the actual villains? Not the people who actively betrayed others? It’s like the show is saying only people with buried hearts — those broken enough to betray and survive — get to live. The kind ones don’t make it.

Park Hyung Sik, however, carried the emotional weight of this show on his back. His final breakdown scene? Genuinely heart-wrenching. For a second, I forgot how messy the writing was. Prosecutor Yeom’s actor also deserves praise — somehow managing to command every scene, even when the plot had no clue what to do with him.

Ultimately, Buried Hearts tried to say a lot — about love, family, grief, guilt, and redemption — but it ended up undermining every theme it tried to build. It made forgiveness feel cheap, grief feel shallow, and love feel transactional. There were many more characters I haven’t even mentioned here — which, frankly, is telling of just how little impact they had on the story. They were there, but that’s about it.

I’m glad it’s over. I really am. The cast deserved better. Especially Park Hyung Sik. If you’re watching for him, maybe you’ll stay for the performance. But if you’re here for the plot? Prepare to be disappointed.

5.5/10 — and that’s purely for the acting. At this point, the only thing buried is my patience — under a mountain of messy arcs, wasted potential, and unnecessary forgiveness.

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So much potential but failed to stick the landing

This drama at a glance had everything going for it. Corporate and political drama, memory loss, family intrigue and scheming surrounding who gets to rule the company, and even a decent splash of romance between Dongju and Eunnam where you were always guessing if they would or wouldn't end up back together. But when going for a revenge plot, especially with so many morally grey or outright evil characters, you MUST stick the landing. The antagonists must face justice, the protagonists should emerge victorious with perhaps a better appreciation for what they had prior to the conflict, and the anti heros need justification and understanding for why they behaved the way they did.

But Buried Hearts totally fails to stick the landing, taking all that build up across 16 episodes and driving it directly into a brick wall. It almost feels like the writers got bored of the show around episode 12/13 and just felt like they had to wrap up the story by any means necessary, regardless of what it would mean for the characters. Almost none of the characters arrive at the end with a better understanding of the world or themselves, the only person who has any real character development is Seonu and he becomes a straight-up murderer out of nowhere in the final 20 minutes of the show when he offs his rival for heir of Daesan group Taeyun. Taeyun's mother never is shown to have any remorse for all the terrible events she caused trying to protect Taeyun, and his death seemingly out of the blue undercuts almost all tension resulting from those actions in the first place. We never really see Yeom Jangseon face any real justice for his crimes, Dongju makes this big show of how he will punish him and in the end all we get is a short conversation between the two and then get told about Dongju taking all of Jangseon's wealth and property but we never see it. Jongseon just ends up let back out on the street to wander back to his old home, no mention of his wife or how she will react to getting him back after a year of being presumed dead.

But i think the biggest two let-downs in terms of character arc are Dongju and Eunnam. Eunnam functionally does not change from start to finish, she feels like an NPC just dragged around by the plot so that Dongju has a reason beyond personal revenge to act the way he does. She never really seems to have much motivation on her own and the issue at the core of their relationship is never resolved in any meaningful way. As for Dongju, he makes this big show at the end about needing to "go find himself" since he feels he can't tell right from wrong anymore after all he has done but it feels wholly unearned. We never see him struggling with this moral question prior to episode 16 and feels like a cheap excuse from the writing team to have him out of the way for Taeyun's murder and to force in a surprise twist of him not actually ending up back with Eunnam.

It feels like the only character that was fully realized was Huh Ildo, and even then they managed to undercut a lot of the emotion and growth behind his character by having him change allegiances one too many times and then killing him immediately after he finally has a heart to heart with Dongju.

Overall, I'd say the show is only worth watching if you want to just see a standard revenge fantasy show as long as you are okay with none of the characters really changing or growing as a result of the events of the show. They feel very 2D and don't seem to exercise a lot of agency over their own lives outside of Dongju and Jangseon.

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