Key Takeaways
The film "Side by Side, It Is Fine to Just Breathe" follows a cohabiting young couple whose future is upended by a lease scam that costs them their deposit.
Lead actor Kim Hyang-gi calls it a "youth survival romance," framing the story as one about dependence, gratitude, and shared endurance.
Director Koh Hyung-jo places Korea's housing crisis at the center, using bleak living conditions to collide realism with romance.
What is left to hold onto when a young couple loses both their housing deposit and their jobs: love, or the bare minimum needed to keep going?
The Korean film "Side by Side, It Is Fine to Just Breathe" puts that question on top of one of the country's sharpest everyday crises: lease fraud. What begins as a sweet cohabitation romance quickly becomes a story about housing insecurity, financial pressure, and the limits of love under strain.
That is why Kim Hyang-gi describes the film as a "youth survival romance." Rather than romanticizing young love, the movie asks what love looks like when reality becomes impossible to ignore.
When a scam becomes the backdrop to romance
The premise is straightforward. Hwaran and Iwan are a young couple living together, making promises about a future they believe they will share. Then lease fraud wipes out their security deposit, forcing them to look for a new place to live. To make things worse, they also lose their jobs. The emotional arc of a romance is suddenly buried under the most practical concerns imaginable: rent, contracts, employment, and where to sleep next month.
What makes the setup effective is that it never turns the crisis into easy melodrama. In South Korea, lease scams are not just newspaper stories. They can destroy a person's financial footing overnight. The film focuses not on public outrage, but on how two people experience the same disaster while trying to stay together. Love is emotional, but housing is arithmetic. Numbers, paperwork, and monthly payments carry more weight than sentiment.
That is why this is not a conventional romance. In most romantic stories, the central question is whether two people will realize their feelings for each other. Here, the question is whether their relationship can survive at all. Holding hands is no longer the point. What matters is whether those hands can keep them standing.
The movie's homes are part of the argument
Director Koh Hyung-jo said he drew on his own experiences of independent living during college, as well as on today's housing conditions. The homes in the film are not merely shabby. They are presented as spaces that test the basic terms of living. A bathroom at the front door, a kitchen connected to the bathroom, or a tiny basement room become more than background details. They are proof of how punishing urban housing can be for young adults.
The broker's joking label for these places as a "bathroom series" may sound funny, but the humor is grim. When a home stops being a refuge and instead becomes the result of compromise, young people are forced to endure conditions rather than build dreams. Koh's idea was that the clash between a cold housing problem and a sugary romance would create something memorable. In that sense, the romance does not erase reality. It makes reality sharper.
Kim Hyang-gi sees gratitude in shared dependence
Kim Hyang-gi said she wanted the film to express how, at a young age, there is value in having someone to rely on emotionally even in difficult circumstances. In another context that might sound like a simple sentiment. In a story about lost deposits and lost wages, it feels more urgent. Having someone to depend on is not a luxury here. It is a lifeline.
Actor Ahn Dong-gu made a similar point. Hwaran and Iwan do not waste their youth in despair. Even under pressure, they avoid blaming each other and instead become each other's support. That matters because lease fraud is not a problem that can be explained away as a personal flaw. It is not enough to tell victims to be stronger or to take responsibility for everything themselves. What they need is safety and a way to recover. The film tries to show how important human solidarity becomes when those conditions disappear.
Actor Jung Yi-rang also said she related to the screenplay. She recognized in the couple the feeling of being in one's twenties, broke but full of dreams and love. That recollection helps explain why the film may resonate beyond its plot. It is not just about one unlucky couple. It is about the shared anxiety of young adults trying to survive in a city where deposits, rents, and housing quality feel increasingly out of reach.
A romance that refuses to escape reality
"Side by Side, It Is Fine to Just Breathe" does not sell love as salvation. It accepts that life can still collapse even when love exists, and that love alone is not enough to carry everything. But within that limit, it asks one clear question: who do you want beside you when the floor gives way?
That is the film's real value. It does not push housing insecurity to the margins as a mere backdrop. It places the problem at the center and lets romance and survival collide there. The repeated cycle of lease fraud may be familiar news, but the film focuses on the private distress hidden inside that larger pattern. Once the deposit is gone, the apartment is unstable, and the couple has to keep moving, every choice becomes part of a shared ethic of endurance.
The film opens on the 18th, and whether it fully convinces audiences remains to be seen. Still, one thing is clear: in an era when lease fraud and housing insecurity feel constant, young love can no longer function as an escape genre. Only love that survives the pressure of reality remains. That may be the most honest emotion Korean cinema can pursue right now.
