YooA and Arin trade music for movie sets, with mixed results so far
The mid-to-late 2010s saw no shortage of K-pop girl groups — the so-called "third generation" of idol acts that gave us Blackpink, Twice, Red Velvet and dozens more.
Oh My Girl were never quite the frontrunners, but they did make their presence felt.
Coming out of the smaller-label WM Entertainment, the group built a loyal fanbase on dreamy, experimental concepts and some genuinely inventive tracks.
They also became one of the industry's unlikelier success stories, breaking through commercially a full five years after debut with "Nonstop" and the earworm B-side "Dolphin" in 2020.
The group is now down to six members. YooA and Arin both left WM last year, signing with new agencies to focus on acting while leaving the door open to future group promotions.
The good news for fans: Both have found their way to the big screen.
Arin's feature film debut arrives March 4 with "Mad Dance Office," a comedy starring "No Other Choice" star Yeom Hye-ran as a buttoned-up civil servant who happens to get hooked on dancing.
Arin plays her daughter, fed up with her overbearing mom and ready to do something about it.
It's a natural next step for the 26-year-old, who's been racking up TV credits for some years now. Her supporting role in tvN's 2022 fantasy blockbuster "Alchemy of Souls," available on Netflix, ran across 30 episodes with Go Youn-jung and Jung So-min in the lead. That followed with leading roles in last year's webtoon-based thriller "S Line" and the romance "My Girlfriend Is a Real Man."
Meanwhile, YooA already made her screen debut last month in the neo-noir heist flick "Project Y." Han So-hee and Jeon Jong-seo star in the film as two women tangled up in Seoul's criminal underworld who steal a cache of black-market gold and spend the rest of the runtime fleeing the thugs who want it back.
YooA's role as a crime boss's airheaded wife is a fun watch, albeit a brief one. Her Ha-kyung hits bars, drunkenly curses at strangers, and meets a grim fate before anyone's had time to learn her name. To her credit, YooA fully sheds every trace of her bubbly idol image and commits to the grit of it all.
The film itself, though, was a massive flop. Despite serious star power and some festival buzz out of Toronto, "Project Y" barely scraped past 100,000 admissions here before getting shipped to streaming just two weeks after release, an unusually short window even by today's standards.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com


