Our Sticky Love: Cast, Recaps and Review (Netflix 2026)

Our Sticky Love (이런 엿같은 사랑) arrived on Netflix on 7 August 2026 with all 12 episodes at once — about 11 hours and 38 minutes end to end. It is directed by Kim Jang-han (My Demon, Do You Like Brahms?) and written by Mo Ji-hye, their second project together after the 2021 series You Raise Me Up.

The premise is an amnesia romance with a gangster underneath it: Go Eun-sae wakes in a country hospital with her memory gone and her fingerprints destroyed, and the scruffy boxing coach at her bedside says they have been together for two years. He is lying. He is also the only reason she is still alive.

Who is in the Our Sticky Love cast?

Three leads carry the plot and about a dozen villagers carry the comedy. The one thing worth knowing before the table: Ha Young’s character answers to two names, and both are correct.

What is Our Sticky Love about?

It is a fake-relationship romance built on top of a corruption case, and the title is a pun that survives translation better than you would expect. 엿 (yeot) is a hard Korean taffy — the village makes it, the grandmother’s cottage is full of it — and 엿 같은 is also a mild Korean swear. The Korean title reads as both “this sticky love” and “this crappy love”, and Netflix’s own Korean episode text signs off with the two leads being as inseparable as a strand of taffy.

The structure is unusual for a rom-com. The first half is a village comedy in which a sharp Seoul prosecutor with no memory keeps catching her supposed boyfriend in small inconsistencies. The second half is a crime drama in which she is the one hunting. The pivot is exact and it happens on schedule.

What happens in episodes 1 to 3?

Eun-sae wakes two weeks after an accident with no memory, no next of kin, and no fingerprints — they were destroyed, which is why the hospital cannot identify her.

⚠️ Spoilers for all 12 episodes from here.

Her doctor tells her that once she is discharged she will be handed to a state facility. Then Jang Tae-ha arrives, says they have been dating for two years and are about to marry, and produces a single Polaroid. The rest of the proof, he says, was on the phone he lost. She goes with him because the alternative is worse.

What actually happened is in flashback. Eun-sae is Prosecutor Go Ji-won of the anti-corruption department. She was dating Gwak Chi-hyeon, aide to Mayor Ju Min-jong, and he introduced her to Baek Sang-gil, founder of Mirae Eden. She followed the two men after a party and left a watch with a microphone in it running while Sang-gil pressed the mayor to honour their arrangement. She retrieved the watch, was spotted, ran, and lost it in an alley to Sang-gil’s men.

Sang-gil then handed Tae-ha his exit interview: one last job before he leaves the organisation for good. Tae-ha found the target unconscious and recognised her instantly. He sent the other men away, called Coach Hong Do-yeop, burned an empty car and filmed it for Sang-gil. As far as the boss knows, the prosecutor is dead.

The first three episodes are Eun-sae testing the story and Tae-ha failing the tests. The villagers do not recognise her. There are no clothes of hers in the house. His account of how they met — he saved her from a toad — is a coach’s meet-cute story with the snake swapped out. She kisses him at the end of the premiere purely to see what happens, and reads the answer off his face.

Meanwhile Chi-hyeon starts hunting for her, and in episode 3 word reaches Sang-gil that the woman he had killed may not be dead.

What happens in episodes 4 to 6?

The lie breaks open from both ends at once: Eun-sae learns that Tae-ha was a gangster, and separately learns exactly what kind of person she used to be.

Episode 4 is the strongest hour of the first half. Hee-ja calls Tae-ha a gangster within Eun-sae’s hearing; Eun-sae, who has been having flashes of being tortured, puts the two together and concludes he was one of the men who hurt her. She runs to Seoul and finds her old friend Park Hyo-jin, expecting to be recognised and rescued. Instead Hyo-jin tells her, evenly, that they fell out because Eun-sae had become cruel and was living off a boyfriend’s money.

That scene is what makes the romance work. Most amnesia dramas use the blank slate to make the heroine sympathetic. This one uses it to let her meet herself as a stranger and not like what she finds.

Episodes 5 and 6 are the village at full volume. Tae-ha’s old subordinate Kim Gang-rok moves in. Eun-sae stops the shaman Maeng-suk from performing a ritual barefoot on knife blades, and gets absorbed into the village women’s circle for it. She and Tae-ha trade childhood damage — her orphanage, his grandmother’s tumour — in the show’s best-written conversation. And a misunderstanding about marriage spirals through the village until Eun-sae asks him outright and he says: yes, but only after your memory comes back.

She hears that as pity. He means it as a promise he does not expect to be able to keep, because he has already told Coach Hong to put her on a boat to Japan.

What happens in episodes 7 to 9?

Eun-sae disappears, the village turns out to look for her, and by the end of episode 8 the amnesia is over.

Episode 7 puts Gi-jun on Tae-ha’s doorstep at night asking pointed questions about a patient whose identity nobody can verify. Episode 8 is where Sang-gil finally assembles it: his most loyal man lied to him, and the prosecutor is alive and in his home village. Tae-ha stops hiding Eun-sae and starts extracting her, and Kaito gets her onto the boat.

She never sails. From the water she watches Tae-ha face Sang-gil’s men alone, and when the fire he sets goes up she remembers everything at once — the investigation, the watch, the torture, her own name.

Episode 9 is the show becoming a different show. The woman who spent eight episodes being protected goes back to Seoul to do the protecting. She still has the evidence, because she backed the footage up before she was ever caught, and she starts building the case that will bury both Sang-gil and the mayor. The cost is that being near her is now dangerous for everyone in the village, Tae-ha included.

What happens in episodes 10 to 12?

Eun-sae wins the case and nearly loses the relationship, and then Sang-gil escapes and the show plays its last card.

Episode 10 is quiet and unglamorous and better for it: she works, he waits, and he starts wondering whether the version of her who loved him in the village exists in Seoul at all. She seeks 15 years for the mayor and life for Sang-gil, who by then has several killings behind him in service of one construction contract.

Then Sang-gil gets loose in transit. He goes straight to the village and takes Tae-ha’s grandmother hostage — and while he is wrecking her house he finds baby photographs of Tae-ha with his mother, and recognises the woman.

Sang-gil is Tae-ha’s father. Before the gang, before Mirae Eden, he was a boxer thrown out for fixing a fight; Tae-ha’s mother left him over it while pregnant, refused the money he offered, and died young. Go Yeon-hong took her in and then raised the boy. Sang-gil spent 14 years with his own son at his right hand and never knew.

Tae-ha comes for his grandmother, tackles Sang-gil outside and takes his gun. He is pointing it at his father and does not know it. When Eun-sae arrives with the police, Sang-gil works out that Tae-ha might actually pull the trigger, and what that would cost him. He takes the gun back and shoots himself with it. He never says why.

Episode 12 closes on a village wedding, with Gi-jun proposing to Su-ji on the side.

How long is every episode of Our Sticky Love?

Every episode is between 42 and 67 minutes, and the season runs 11 hours and 38 minutes in total — an average of 58 minutes. The runtimes below are Netflix’s own, cross-checked against the series’ episode data.

The shape of that column is worth a glance. The heaviest hour is episode 5, in the middle of the romance; the two episodes that resolve everything are the two shortest in the season, with episode 11 at 42 minutes. The episodes have no titles — Netflix lists them simply as Episode 1 to Episode 12.

Why does Go Eun-sae have two names?

Because one was given to her and one was assigned to her, and she prefers the one from her mother.

Her legal name is Go Ji-won: that is the name the orphanage registered her under as a baby. Go Eun-sae is the name her birth mother gave her before leaving her there, and she only found it years later, in her mother’s diary. She told Tae-ha this once, in Japan, on her birthday, on a beach, eight years before the series starts — along with the story of the moles on her body.

That detail is why the whole plot is possible. When Tae-ha needs the hospital to release an unidentified woman to him, he can produce things only a partner would know. It is also why he can call her Eun-sae with a straight face while everyone in Seoul is looking for Ji-won.

It is a neat piece of construction: the show’s central lie is assembled entirely out of true things.

Why does Baek Sang-gil shoot himself?

Because he has just discovered he is Tae-ha’s father and decides, in about ninety seconds, that the one thing he can still give his son is not being the man his son killed.

The show has been careful about this. Sang-gil’s own account of himself is a man who was cheated out of a boxing career and built an empire out of spite; what the flashbacks show is a man who cheated, lost everything including a pregnant girlfriend who would not take his money, and never stopped looking for the child. He recruited Tae-ha because he saw a boxer worth having. The irony is total and neither of them ever gets to discuss it.

He also does not tell Tae-ha. That is the choice the finale is actually about: Sang-gil’s own father did him damage, and refusing to pass the name on is the only form of restraint he has ever managed. Tae-ha ends the series not knowing who he was holding a gun on.

Whether that lands as devastating or as convenient is the argument this ending will generate. It resolves the plot without requiring the hero to forgive anyone, which is tidy — perhaps a little too tidy for a show that spent 11 hours arguing that people are more than their worst decisions.

Where was Our Sticky Love filmed?

In Dangjin, on South Korea’s west coast, with some Seoul work on top. Filming ran from 10 April to 18 November 2025.

The village scenes were shot around several Dangjin landmarks — Myeoncheon Goljeongji Pond, the Sunseong cherry blossom trail, and the Ami Art Museum. Some Seoul sequences were shot on the humanities campus of Sungkyunkwan University in Jongno-gu, using weekends when students were thin on the ground, with a water truck brought in for the rain scenes.

Two dates worth putting together: the shoot wrapped in November 2025 and the series landed in August 2026, so this sat finished for the better part of nine months while Netflix placed it in a 2026 Korean slate of 33 titles.

Is Our Sticky Love worth watching?

Yes, with one caveat: you are watching it for the first six episodes and the last two, and there is a stretch in the middle where the show marks time.

Here is where the numbers sit as of 8 August 2026, one day after release, so all of them are early and moving.

The Rotten Tomatoes blank is not a failure to find data — it is the data. A 12-episode Netflix Korean original with two well-known leads had not accumulated a single logged critic review a day after launch, which tells you how English-language coverage of K-dramas actually works: the recap sites move within hours, the review aggregators often never arrive at all.

What works. The best decision in the show is refusing to make Eun-sae likeable in retrospect. When she finally reaches someone from her old life, the news is not that she was wronged — it is that she was unkind, and that her one real friend has been waiting years for an apology she cannot now remember owing. A lesser version of this story makes the amnesia a way to excuse the heroine. This one makes it a way to convict her, and then lets her decide what to do about it.

The second good decision is structural. The show puts the memory recovery at the end of episode 8, not in the finale, which buys four full episodes of the reversed dynamic — the protected becoming the protector, the man who spent eight hours managing her safety left standing in a village waiting for her to call. Most amnesia dramas save the recovery for the last twenty minutes and never get to play that.

The casting carries a structural load too. Tae-ha is written as a man whose entire visible behaviour is a lie he is not good at, so the part is built out of hesitation rather than declaration — the opposite of what Jung Hae-in is usually asked for. Ha Young, who most viewers will know as the senior nurse in The Trauma Code, has the harder assignment by some distance: the role is effectively three people — the prosecutor in flashback, the blank one in the village, and the woman who has to reconcile them — and the script hands her all three with no montage to bridge them.

What does not. Episodes 5 to 7 are where the season sags. The marriage misunderstanding is a full-episode engine built out of villagers mishearing things, and it exists mainly to delay a conversation the two leads could have had. Su-ji’s unresolved feelings for Tae-ha are wheeled out twice for jealousy beats and then dropped. Gang-rok is set up as a possible traitor for two episodes and turns out to be a football streamer.

The bigger problem is the tonal gearbox. The show runs a broad village comedy and a torture-and-corruption thriller through the same stretch of episodes, and it does not always change gear cleanly — a comic set piece about a shaman’s knife ritual sits in the same hours as a woman recovering the memory of having her fingerprints burned off. When it works, the contrast is the point. When it doesn’t, the comedy feels like it is happening to different people.

And the ending, for all its craft, resolves the antagonist by having him remove himself. It is the most emotionally loaded choice available and also the one that requires the least of everyone still alive.

Our rating: 3.5 out of 5. A rom-com with an unusually hard centre, a genuinely well-placed pivot, and two hours of middle it could lose. Watch it for what it does with the second name.

Will there be an Our Sticky Love season 2?

Nothing has been announced. Netflix has not commented on a renewal, and the series was made and released as a self-contained limited series — Netflix’s own page labels it exactly that.

The ending also closes properly: the case is won, the antagonist is gone, and the couple marry. There is no dangling thread of the kind that usually signals a second season, which for a K-drama of this type is normal rather than notable. Most Korean series in this mould run once and stop.

Where can you watch Our Sticky Love?

On Netflix, everywhere, included with any plan. All 12 episodes went up on 7 August 2026, and there is no rental or purchase tier.

Availability checked on 8 August 2026. Audio is available in Korean, English and Japanese, with English, Korean and Traditional Chinese subtitles; Netflix rates it 13+ globally, while the Korean rating is 15 and over.

You can watch it here: Our Sticky Love on Netflix .

If you want more in this vein, The Affair Was Just the Beginning is a Korean series working a very different register on the same broad subject — what people hide from each other — and The East Palace is the one to read if you want another single-arc drama where the ending does the heavy lifting.