Someone Special 2004

Dong Chi-sung Jung Jae-young is a professional baseball player who has dated many women but never found his true first love. His outlook is shaken when his latest relationship ends, and on the same day he receives devastating news: a malignant tumor with only three months to live. With September already underway, he faces a countdown to the new year that changes the way he sees everything. He drifts into a bar to drown his sorrows, searching for something that might still surprise him about life.

“I always think it’s love, but sooner or later I find out it’s not…”

In the haze after a night of drinking, he wakes up in a hotel room beside a bartender, a quirky woman who reveals she folded him up and carried him in a box—an odd image that unsettles him even as her brisk, matter-of-fact narration offers a strange kind of clarity. She speaks of how he acts when he’s drunk, then slips away, leaving him to wrestle with the strange morning-after reality. The next day brings another kind of unsettled focus: Chi-sung heads to baseball practice, yet his concentration is fractured. Once a university pitcher, he was shifted to the outfield after a shoulder injury and has since drifted down toward the minor leagues, never regaining the center of his former promise.

On his commute home, a confessional radio program devoted to love stories catches his attention. A voice calling herself “Writing Princess” is telling of carrying a man in a box to a hotel room and speaking to him there. The tale feels eerily resonant with what happened to him, inviting questions about who this storyteller might be and what she represents in his tangled life.

Han Yi-yeon Lee Na-young works part-time in a bar and at a coffee shop, and she spends her listening hours engrossed in these radio confessions. Ten years earlier, a boy in a baseball uniform had moved into her neighborhood, and since then she has carried a quiet, unwavering crush on him from afar. That longing becomes real one night when he walks into the bar alone, and she is struck to see him cry. After only three drinks, he collapses and falls unconscious.

With a blend of tenderness and hesitation, Yi-yeon takes Chi-sung to a nearby hotel and watches over him as he sleeps. The moment fills her with a longing to remain close, even if she can’t find the words to express it. When his sleep is deep, she mutters to herself and then leaves, returning to her routine while continuing to send postcards to her favorite radio programs, hoping that somewhere, someone will hear their own stories mirrored in hers.

The incident at the hotel becomes a catalyst for both of them. Chi-sung confronts Yi-yeon about what happened with the radio tale, but the dispute also opens doors. A different radio station responds with a practical gift: a free mobile phone for Yi-yeon, a lifeline since Chi-sung has just lost his own. Not long after, another gift arrives in the form of free movie tickets, and Yi-yeon invites him to join her on a cinema trip. While watching a film, Chi-sung re-encounters his old girlfriend and, in a moment of frank simplicity, describes Yi-yeon as “just a woman I know.” The remark sharpens the ache and the possibility—could this woman who has quietly become so important to him become someone truly special?

In this story of chance meetings, fragile hope, and the fragile balance between fear and longing, the two strangers navigate the blurred lines between patient care and impulsive attraction. Each encounter—whether it’s a box, a hotel room, a radio confession, or a shared theater moment—drives them toward a single question: can Yi-yeon become more than a distant memory or a fleeting moment in Chi-sung’s limited time, and can Chi-sung allow himself to believe that love could still arrive when time is running out?