Dear Hongrang Review: Netflix's Boldest Joseon Mystery Lands With a Question Nobody Can Answer

Netflix's latest sageuk arrived without warning and immediately unsettled every expectation. Dear Hongrang, which premiered May 16, 2025 with all eleven episodes, opens with a question that drives the entire drama: is the man who has returned home after twelve years the real Hong-rang — or a very convincing fraud?

Set in the late Joseon Dynasty, the drama centers on Lee Jae-wook's Hong-rang, a young man who reappears with no memory of the powerful Sim merchant household he left as a child. His half-sister Jae-yi, played by Jo Bo-ah, has spent a decade searching for him — only to greet his return with suspicion rather than relief. The result is one of the most tension-loaded sibling dynamics in recent Korean television.

Identity as Weapon: The Show's Central Engine

What separates Dear Hongrang from other identity-mystery sageuks is the way writer Kim Jin-ah weaponizes uncertainty itself. Viewers are never quite sure whether to trust Hong-rang, which means every tender moment carries an undercurrent of dread. Lee Jae-wook — best known for his role in Extraordinary You and Alchemy of Souls — delivers a performance of studied opacity. He is warm and disarming in a way that could be genuine or calculated, and the camera lingers on his face long enough to let both interpretations coexist.

Jo Bo-ah anchors the drama's emotional core with more certainty. Her Jae-yi is not a passive love interest but an active investigator, and her determination to unmask a potential impostor gives the story its forward momentum. Director Kim Hong-sun, whose previous work includes Money Heist: Korea and Voice, shoots the Joseon landscapes — primarily Gyeongju and Jeonju Hanok Village — with the kind of lyrical framing that justifies every period-accurate costume and set-piece. The result is a drama that looks expensive, and largely earns what it is spending.

Netflix Global Debut: The Numbers at Launch

Within three days of its May 16 premiere, Dear Hongrang had accumulated 2.2 million views globally. By May 17 it held the number six position on Netflix's Global Top 10 Non-English TV chart, with Top 10 placements in over twelve countries simultaneously. Those included South Korea and Thailand at number four, Brazil at number six, and Japan and Indonesia in the top ten.

Those numbers positioned the drama as one of the stronger sageuk debuts on Netflix in recent memory. For context, the platform has launched several Korean period dramas that struggled to crack the global top ten in their opening week; Dear Hongrang managed it on arrival. By its second week, it climbed to third position globally, accumulating 3.5 million views and entering Top 10 in over forty countries — a trajectory that confirmed the initial weekend was not a spike but a sustained audience.

Where It Lands Among 2025's Sageuk Competition

The timing of Dear Hongrang's release is not incidental. Netflix has been systematically building a sageuk pipeline as a counterpart to its contemporary romance output, and a May premiere puts the drama into one of the year's most competitive windows. May 2025 alone launched more than ten new Korean dramas across multiple platforms, with tvN, JTBC, Disney+, and ENA all fielding entries. The fact that Dear Hongrang opened on Netflix as an all-episode drop — rather than a weekly rollout — signals confidence in binge-watch behavior, which international audiences reliably provide for the platform's sageuk titles.

Director Kim Hong-sun's track record matters here. His 2022 Money Heist: Korea was a polarizing adaptation of a Spanish property, but it demonstrated his ability to manage ensemble casts and overlapping plot timelines under commercial pressure. Dear Hongrang benefits from that precision: the eleven-episode structure is unusually tight for a sageuk (which often run to sixteen or twenty episodes), and the editing reflects a discipline to cut exposition and keep audience attention on the identity question at the center.

Early Criticism and the Loose Thread Problem

Not every early reaction was fully positive. The drama earned an IMDB score of 7.6 and a MyDramaList score of 8.1 from over 13,000 viewers, which places it firmly in the upper tier of 2025 Korean drama debuts — but early discussion on social platforms flagged some of the same issues that have troubled sageuk in recent years. Several viewers noted that the romance chemistry between the two leads — complicated by their potential blood relation — was strongest in early episodes and became less convincing as the story progressed. Others pointed to a resolution that left multiple plot threads unaddressed, a complaint that shows up with enough consistency to suggest it reflects the drama rather than individual taste.

South China Morning Post described the drama as "ravishing but mystifying," a formulation that captures the tension at its heart: Dear Hongrang is visually and atmospherically rewarding in ways that its narrative payoffs sometimes do not match. Gulf News called it "a traumatic tale that leaves you with emotional damage" — which, in the context of sageuk, reads more like a recommendation than a warning.

What It Means for the Sageuk Format

At its best, Dear Hongrang demonstrates what Netflix and Studio Dragon can produce when they commit to genre craft over formula. The mystery mechanics are clean, the performances are calibrated, and the visual language communicates status and suspicion through costume and light rather than exposition. Lee Jae-wook's casting is particularly astute: his ability to read as innocent and as calculating simultaneously is precisely the quality the character demands. Few actors working in Korean television right now can hold that dual read as consistently as he does here.

The drama also benefits from excellent timing. Its premiere comes at a moment when global appetite for Korean historical content is confirmed and growing, and when Netflix's sageuk track record — built through titles like Mr. Sunshine, Kingdom, and Under the Queen's Umbrella — has established a baseline of quality expectation that the platform's international subscribers now treat as reliable. Dear Hongrang lands in that tradition without quite transcending it, which may be the most honest summary of its achievement: a very good drama, and by late Joseon standards, a very dangerous one.