This review may contain spoilers
We Are All Trying Here has become my all-time favorite drama
I don’t know what movies are to others. For me, movies are survival itself. My days are a loop: I wake up in the afternoon, I eat, I watch a film, and then I work. In the past, I would spend the rest of the day translating films. Now, I study cinema history and watch related films to write scripts for my channel, or I edit videos. When I need to rest, I play music or watch other films; then, I go back to work.Evening comes. I go to the market and cook. I talk to my girlfriend. When she falls asleep, I watch a drama while eating. Then, I go back to work again. Time slips away—I eat, I watch, I work. In the morning, I talk to my girlfriend again, watch something else, and finally, I sleep. For 10 years, I have been living in this cycle—a routine that occupies about 29 days of every month.
Whenever my spirit sinks, it is usually films that provide the strength I need to keep living. K-dramas rarely give me that kind of profound, quiet strength, but We Are All Trying Here did. While Reply 1988 was my all-time favorite, We Are All Trying Here has now become my personal, all-time favorite.
I liked it from the very first episode, but I never expected the ending to be handled this perfectly. In episode 11, I was deeply impressed, but I didn't think they could wrap up every single character so beautifully in just one final episode. I was wrong. Every character stayed true to their purpose until the very end. The businessman remained a businessman; those between the artist and the entertainment world stayed right in that space; and the only true "artist" in the show stayed true to his convictions until the final moment.
Seeing this final part, I realized that Park Hae-young is not just a screenwriter—she is an artist who truly understands what it means to live. Even if Hwang Dong-man is the protagonist, the soul of this story lies with his brother, the poet Hwang Jin-man. She shaped this throughout every episode, and in the finale, it reached its true climax. The real climax of the story was found in the character who had the fewest scenes among the leads. One could say we felt the most poetic experience through a character who had stopped writing poems.
In the act of creating art, the hardest part is not telling people what you want to say, but knowing what not to say. Hwang Dong-man is a character who talks too much, but Hwang Jin-man is a character who never says anything unnecessary. In We Are All Trying Here, watching Hwang Dong-man feels like seeing myself, but watching Hwang Jin-man feels like seeing the person I want to become. It might be an impossible dream, but my life’s ambition is to become someone like him—someone who wants for nothing and who can live courageously in a corner of the world, defined entirely by his own meaning.
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