Dream (2024)

it had potential and can't deliver until too late

i was so stoked when i heard about the premise and saw some teaser or trailer for the show. i am 5 episodes in at the writing of this review.
waste of time. i have started scrubbing through the episodes so the 50 minute ordeal takes maybe 10. after all time is the most precious resource any of us have. why am i even still watching? i wanna be kind and give it a chance. a generous one cause some GL are just cursed and can't find their footing until later. here's the list of problems: wooden acting, no chemistry, no story progression, no cohesion, the mother traumas so far don't add anything but slow things down, the main characters have no compelling motivation. shouldn't halfway through be any love established between the leads?

UPDATE: somehow for some reason i watched more episodes. overall not much better but there were a total of 3 out 10 episodes where i didn't fast forward most of it. so i increased the rating. the main character actress has good acting moments later in the show

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Earlier this year I decided that I'm going to watch every major Thai GL because, thanks to the unexpected success of GAP, wlw dramas have been popping up from every corner of Thai entertainment industry and I want to support it as much as I can. But damn, this one was a struggle to go through.

As soon as I've read the synopsis this drama piqued my attention because the premise sounds...well, dreamy. Like some oneiric fairytale. And you can do so much with dreams as the recurring motif of the romance story. After all, dreams are messages from the unconscious, they are signaling things that are hidden deep withing ourselves, feelings that are not fully realized. Unfortunately, this drama turns this concept into some gimmick that is shown a couple of times and doesn't really mean anything. Allegedly, the main characters have been meeting each other in their dreams since they were little kids but we never see any of that. Later they meet in real life and there is absolutely no reaction from both of them. I mean, you met this person who you thought was just a product of your imagination and you don't have any kind of emotional response to that? Then they fall in love but cannot be together, yet they still meet in their dreams, which seems important plot-wise, as enhancement of yearning and angst. We see this maybe twice, as most of the time the girls have petty fight due to pent up frustration because they are stuck in the most brain rotting cycle of misunderstandings that could have been easily resolved with one honest reaction between the friends that they are suposedly are.
What's the point?

And then we have a huge pacing issue because for some reason the director decided that jumping straight into angst without any build up is a good idea. The thing is, you can't make me care about emotional turmoil these girls are going through without giving any context for the character's feelings or motivations. For the good 5 episodes (of 12 episodes long drama!) it was just a constant rehash of the same vague confilct. It wasn't until halfway through the show when the characters finally started to make sense. However, the reasoning for their behaviour was often rather weak or rather not satisfying. Mental health issues are used as an explanation for some character's actions and attitude and while I appreciate unprejudiced approach to this topic, it is still very simplified. The severity of depression that one of the characters was going throught was never talked about in more depth, while in fact it affected literally everyone in this drama. Once that character stopped being emotionally stunted, most issues disappeared. As everything, it needed a little more build up to make it more believeable.

One thing I actually found good was the chemistry. Not like the main couple had a lot of chances to show it off because most of the time they were separated or put into dumbass conflict, but in more relaxed or intimate scenes they shined. The highschool flashback was easilly good, my favourite episode. Fay and May deserved a better show.

Overall, I'm not recommending it to anyone. It's a prime example of wasted potential, bizarre direction and awful writing. 12 hours of boredom mixed with exhausting frustration. It doesn't make sense, right? Exactly.

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