Shin Ha-kyun visits his resurrected wife in sci-fi drama Yonder

by Jenzy

As the first collaborative effort put out by the two streaming platforms — TVING and Paramount+ — upcoming dystopian sci-fi project Yonder was already setting high expectations. To that, add cinema-darling director Lee Joon-ik (The Book of Fish) first’s foray into dramas, and talented actors Shin Ha-kyun (Unicorn) and Han Ji-min (Our Blues), and you have a buzzy potential hit on your hands.

Yonder is set in the near future where the memories of the dead can be uploaded to a place called Yonder, and they can continue to live and be visited by their loved ones. Our lead Shin Ha-kyun plays a widower Jae-hyun who is wrecked over the death of his wife Yi-hu — played by Han Ji-min — until one day he receives a message from her telling him to come to Yonder, where she is.

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We see this concept play out more in the teaser that just dropped. In the first scenes, we’re shown a happier moment between Jae-hyun and Yi-hu, laughing at a beach. This is contrasted with Jae-hyun’s distressed face as the voiceover of a doctor tells us Yi-hu’s time of death. He’s alone in his somber apartment until a video message of his wife pops up on his TV, where she tells him, “I’m here. Come here if you want to see me.”

In the last scenes, Jae-hyun drives up a mountain while title cards tell us it’s “the last place where you can see your loved ones.” Once he makes it to the mystical forest Yonder, Yi-hu serenely greets him: “You made it.”

This promises to be an introspective and bittersweet look at death, life, and the grieving process through the genre of sci-fi that I imagine fans of Arrival or After Yang would love. This wouldn’t be my first time crying at a Han Ji-min project either (still recovering from The Light in Your Eyes), so I’m going to be watching this with tissues ready.

Written by Kim Jung-Hun, Oh Seung-Hyun, and Kim Sung-Cheol, Yonder will air this October on TVING.