Huh, those were two incredibly weird hours.
I am not familiar with the source material, but I’ve had Hot Gimmick on my watchlist for ages. The preview on Netflix had me genuinely convinced that this movie would be good, but I still couldn’t get around watching it. It was a friend of mine who convinced me that I just had to sit through this, purely for how strange this film really is, so we did.
And boy was she right.

Let’s get one thing out of the way before we start: Hot Gimmick is not good. The “story” is probably up there with one of the worst I have ever seen in a romance movie. The characters were all underdeveloped, unlikable or just downright sex-offenders. The pacing and the way this is cut, was very confusing to say the least. Every single performance had me cringing hard. On almost every level Hot Gimmick is a failure. And yet there is something more to it. But let me elaborate.

One can’t critique a movie without talking about the plot but when it comes to Hot Gimmick this is kind of a hard task. I feel like this film both had too little AND too much going on, all at the same time. Like, I am having a really had time, trying to remember like a single complete arc, but at the same time, I was confused about what actually was happening through the entirety of the movie. No one really does anything, and yet there is this whole universe set up with overly convoluted dynamics and backstories. It felt like everything that actually mattered, happened off-screen. The main girl is in love with idol-boy from the beginning of the movie but we never find out why or since when. She has this really complex family story with an adopted brother that only gets explained very briefly in a throwaway line that is easy to miss. Everyone’s parents in this are actually important and a vital part of the characters’ backstories, yet we don’t see a single one of them on screen, aside from main girl’s mom (who arguably was the only parent who didn’t matter in this whole debacle). Everything resembling a plot already happened before the movie even started. The protagonist never does anything, things just happen to her. It was like the film wasn’t even about her, she’s the only one that doesn’t get a backstory, so all Hot Gimmick movie really is, is her reacting to the past of other people. And since nothing is actually actively happening, all we’re left with is a story with already set rules that never really get explained nor challenged.

The characters, and even calling them that feels like a stretch, were a nightmare. As briefly mentioned in the above paragraph, our protagonist was one of the most passive ones I have ever seen. She doesn’t really have an opinion on anything and seems to be doing things without a purpose in mind. She’s supposed to be this symbol of naivety and purity and yet whenever anyone makes a move on her, she simply goes along with it. The only bit of a personality we get to see is when she refers to herself as ugly, which she does a lot.
The only character that I can call an actual character with personality was the protagonist’s sister but she was so insignificant to the plot that there wasn’t even a real reason for her to be here. Still, I was always happy to see her, she was a breath of fresh air.
I wanted all of the love interest dead, no exaggeration. At this point, I am used to Asian dramas blurring the lines of consent, sadly, but the extent and frequency to which this happened here was one that I could no longer overlook. I was deeply uncomfortable with many scenes in this movie. The male characters were incredibly cruel to our protagonist throughout the entire runtime and no one really grew from it. I guess her big brother was kind of unproblematic, or at least he would have been, if he didn’t have the hots for his little sister, so yeah there’s that. They also don’t do much, besides being romantically interested in the female lead.
Which brings us to our next problem: there is no chemistry. And that’s like the most important thing in a love story. I am willing to forgive a romance a lot if the couple has chemistry. Well, this film had three pairings and not a single one of them had any. But how could they, no one really has a legit reason to like anyone here. The female lead has as much personality as an IKEA cardboard box that was left in the rain and all the guys do is either sexually harass the girl or victim-blame her.
There was one (1!!!) scene where I felt like a couple had chemistry, it was one where glasses man and wet-cardboard-box-girl walked home side-by-side and had pretty legit banter. In those few minutes, I was almost willing to extent my disbelief and buy that these two characters like each other. Sadly, I wasn’t able to forget their previous scene together where he blackmailed her into kissing him on a public train station so I wasn’t in a very romantic mood.

This movie is gorgeous. I am not kidding, it’s legitimately beautiful. The cinematography is outstanding and I couldn’t name a single shot that wasn’t aesthetically pleasing. But it’s beautiful without a purpose. Art isn’t supposed to just look nice; it’s supposed to make us feel something. And Hot Gimmick failed on that level. Because, while every shot in this looked beautiful, most of them failed to communicate something. There were only very few scenes where I actually understood what they were going for, why something was shown the way it was, what mood it was trying to get across.
And the cutting suffers from the very same problem. Because most of the time the cut of a film isn’t supposed to stand out UNLESS you want to communicate a certain emotion. Action scenes are quickly cut and hectic for a reason, for example. Well in Hot Gimmick everything is cut extremely quickly all the time, for absolutely no reason. Except for one scene that was entirely one-shot, again, with seemingly no particular reason in mind. This made this film extremely hard to watch. Scenes in which the characters were just standing still and calmly talking to each other felt physically exhausting because it was so difficult to keep up with what was going on.

The soundtrack is genuinely kinda nice and something I wouldn’t mind casually listening to , but also dictated the mood instead of accentuating it. However, it did help me decipher, which scenes were supposed to be romantic,
because strictly by the actions of the characters, I never would have been able to guess.

So, you might read all of this and think that I hate Hot Gimmick but you would only be half correct. I gave this 9 stars for Rewatch Value for a reason. The last, let’s say 15 minutes of the movie had me genuinely moved and I don’t even have the slightest clue why. It’s not like I suddenly was invested in the plot, it’s not like I suddenly loved the characters but out of nowhere Hot Gimmick became raw and emotional. There’s this scene, pretty close to the end of the movie, where our female and male lead just randomly run through a park and yell at each other for what felt like an eternity and I was weirdly hooked through the entirety of it. Like for almost two hours, Hot Gimmick had been trying to impress me, with its fancy shots and with its attempts at being poignant, but it needed a shaky handcam and two teenagers incoherently yelling at each other for me to feel something. For the first time in the two-hour run time, I felt like I truly got it. I got what the movie was trying to tell me, got what the characters I thought I didn’t care about were going through. The weird cutting, the cinematography, the seemingly incoherent dialogue all kind of clicked together at that moment. It was fast-paced, awkward, helpless, and clumsy like teenage love is.
It’s absurd, because I can imagine a version of this that could have worked but at the same time, a good version of Hot Gimmick would require to change pretty much everything about it. Still, there is something good in here, I’m just not sure what it is and whatever it may be, it’s very very well hidden. But it’s not just the cinematography, there is something real about this film. For a few minutes, I felt weirdly represented in how honest, how awkward, how bizarre it was. At times I thought “This should have been a three-minute music video” at other times I thought “this should have been a 16 episodes TV show”. I knew what I was watching was objectively bad and yet I couldn’t give up on it.

Sadly, the potential to be good, doesn’t make something good. So Hot Gimmick simply isn’t and I cannot recommend sitting through this madness, unless you're interested in it from a film-making perspective, which was what intrigued me when I watched it. It doesn’t really work as a “so bad it’s good”-movie, for that it simply doesn’t have enough going on and requires too much focus but there are a few unintentionally hilarious scenes (look out for the hot chocolate scene as it had my friends and me laughing out loud).
Usually, when I am talking about wasted potential in a movie or show, I’d say that the basics were there, but the execution failed. Well, Hot Gimmick is the opposite. The very foundation was missing. The plot sucks, the writing’s bad, the performances are weak. And yet it’s beautiful. It’s like a castle built on sand, the very thing Jesus said one should never do.