The sorrow inside the spirit: What Head Over Heels revealed about pain, misjudgment, and the humanity we bury

Seong-A, the mudang in Head Over Heels | Image via: Netflix
Seong-A, the mudang in Head Over Heels | Image via: Prime Video

That's how Head Over Heels begins: Ghosts whisper, curses pass from body to body, and exorcisms must be paused for school. The drama, however, does not draw maps to banish the supernatural. Instead, it digs into what was buried inside people: the shame that shaped them, the guilt that leaked into everything, and the kindness offered sometimes a bit too late.

Each episode of Head Over Heels reveals how pain moves without warning. It sits beside you, saying nothing, waiting for someone to stay.

“Grief doesn’t ask for attention here. It lives in the corners.”

Head Over Heels understands that the loudest cries often come from those who never speak.

Seong-a never asked for much.

“I want to attend my high school graduation ceremony and college entrance ceremony. I want to take a photo with a flower bouquet.”

She didn’t get it, but she kept going. The miracle isn’t in the breaking of the curse, it lives in the small gestures that hold someone who should’ve been left behind.

“I’d rather take down a ghost. People are much worse.”

The dead cry, the living cause harm, and still, some choose to stay.

Head Over Heels does not promise redemption, but it builds it slowly, through witnessing and more. Every ghost is just a reflection of what still aches, and when someone reaches out without understanding the weight of what they’re holding, something shifts. It doesn’t miraculously heal, but it becomes bearable.

Poster for Head Over Heels | Image via: tvN
Poster for Head Over Heels | Image via: tvN

Head Over Heels and the quiet violence of judgment

The dead can scream, but they don’t gossip behind your back. They don’t twist your story or smile while watching you fall apart. Head Over Heels removes the veil gently, and what lingers isn't just death, but judgment. Not the supernatural kind, but the one that sits in classrooms, which speaks in silences and performs cruelty under the disguise of concern.

Seong-a wears a mask to school to hide what she is, and not because her powers make her dangerous, but because people do. The world she walks through is designed to discredit her, to erase what she carries before anyone dares to understand it. She isn’t haunted by spirits. She’s haunted by looks, expectations, and the opposite of protection, which is what she does.

Yeom-hwa doesn’t haunt because she’s cursed, but because she’s allowed to. She carries a coffin on her back but refuses to carry the weight of it, so her grief becomes a license and her pain becomes an excuse. People forgive her before she asks, and people die believing she can still be saved. She lets them.

Some ghosts scream, some sign their names on official paper, and some whisper the word “mother” like it still carries weight. Head Over Heels sees them all.

Posters for the main characters of Head Over Heels | Images via: tvN
Posters for the main characters of Head Over Heels | Images via: tvN

Pain that asks in silence

Pain waits in the corners, and it settles into classrooms, hospital rooms, and corridors with lockers and shoes half-tied. In Head Over Heels, sorrow arrives without announcement and stays beside those who carry it alone. A missed call marks the time of a death. A fire ghost wraps its limbs around a boy. Two events unfold in parallel, both heavy and both irreversible. The grandmother fades. Gyeon-woo aches. The wounds split across time.

At the funeral, Seong-a stands in silence. Gyeon-woo screams from somewhere deep, somewhere untouched by comfort. His grief rises not from her presence, but from what her presence allows him to feel. She watches, he breaks, and the air changes.

Mo Beom walks the same paths. Bullying marks his body. Shame settles into his steps. The spirit that follows him carries sorrow, not menace. The ghost amplifies what the world already made unbearable. No one calls it cruelty, but it spreads through silence, through every choice to ignore, to isolate, to laugh.

A doll holds a child’s ghost. A mother pours love into absence until the illusion feels real. Seong-a sees this. Her presence opens a space where even unspeakable love can be named.

Each haunting in Head Over Heels begins with something human. Pain arrives in silence, but once seen, it transforms, not into light, not into clarity. Into something bearable. Into something shared.

Scene from Head Over Heels | Image via: Prime Video
Scene from Head Over Heels | Image via: Prime Video

Misjudgment, mercy, and the ones who kept choosing harm

Some choices rot everything around them. Yeom-hwa walks through Head Over Heels carrying her son’s coffin like a monument to grief. His soul stays sealed inside, not as a memory, but as proof of what she never repaired. Her pain hardens while her cruelty sharpens, but the living and spiritual worlds keep offering her chances.

The head shaman gives her one final gift: a death exchanged for faith. A sacrifice meant to save what remained. Yeom-hwa receives that love and walks away unchanged. She continues forward, dragging the coffin, silencing the harm, and shifting the weight onto everyone else.

Redemption has a cost. In Head Over Heels, those who refuse to pay it leave others to settle the debt. Park Seong-a holds the aftermath. She wears the bruises, and she buries what Yeom-hwa won’t. She does so while still offering presence, still showing up, still holding space for someone who left ruin in every room she entered.

One boy offers a ring, and the wrong hands receive it. The gesture holds no magic. The flower wilts before it’s touched. Some offerings bloom, while others expose the rot in the soil.

Every act of mercy in this story tests the ground it lands on. Some take root and others sink into someone who has already decided never to grow.

Scene from Head Over Heels | Image via: Prime Video
Scene from Head Over Heels | Image via: Prime Video

What remains when others move on

The classroom breathes differently. Desks rearranged, uniforms fresh, voices louder. Jin-ung, once fire and fists, now walks the halls with a quieter kind of presence. Students laugh, graduation approaches, and routines reclaim their rhythm.

Seong-a does not return.

Her desk stays in place, her name does not need to be spoken. She fills the air between every line. The ones who once stood beside her move forward holding joy, but also something else. Memory trails behind each step.

She once said,

“I want to attend my high school graduation ceremony and college entrance ceremony. I want to take a photo with a flower bouquet.”

The wish remains simple; her fulfillment never arrives. Others stand in her place and those flowers bloom for someone else. In the end, though, she accepts that she is extraordinary.

Gyeon-woo and Jiho gather in front of a camera and they make space for her. The photo holds absence like an offering. Nothing speaks louder than what remains unsaid. The empty place in the frame carries more weight than any confession.

The shrine empties and the deities retreat.

“A shrine ends up like this, without its owner.”

The line lands with softness and sorrow. What once held power now waits in silence.

Head Over Heels does not clear the table. It sets another place, it leaves room, and that space speaks.


The slow shape of healing and the girl who stayed

Seong-a returns to where it all began. The same exorcism she once left unfinished now opens before her again. She breathes, with calm shoulders and steady breath. It is time.

The girl who used to run through hallways with talismans now fills the ritual with her presence. Her power doesn’t come from ceremony but from what she carried in silence. She doesn’t step into the role. She is the role, breathing through it without hesitation.

The kiss with Gyeon-woo comes after the storm. After the years and after the ache. They meet not to fix anything but to mark what still stands. Their hands find each other like roots finally breaking through stone.

Head Over Heels treats healing as presence. It holds spring like a secret earned. The yellow field doesn’t promise peace: it offers space.

Seong-a remains. That is the arc and the answer. The girl who wanted a photo with flowers now understands what it means to grow something inside a field full of ghosts. She finally blooms.


What Head Over Heels teaches about pain, judgment, and staying human

Every ritual in Head Over Heels begins with a wound that refuses to fade, and every act of care grows out of something left behind. The series never rushes to solve anything. It invites the audience to sit with the discomfort, to witness grief that unfolds in silence, and to recognize how often cruelty wears the face of familiarity.

What Head Over Heels teaches is simple: healing begins when someone stops walking away. Pain loses its edge when it is seen. Misjudgment leaves deeper marks than any curse, and mercy carries power even when no one asks for it.

At the end of Head Over Heels, Seong-a carries the weight of others without erasing herself. She listens, she stays, and she holds space for the ghosts no one else could name. Her strength grows in the spaces between rituals, becoming visible not through power, but through presence.

The story of Head Over Heels reminds us that kindness without understanding can still cut, and love offered blindly can miss its mark. When care meets clarity, however, even the haunted begin to breathe.

We learn to pay attention to what is left unsaid. We learn to ask who remains when everything else fades. And in that question, we find something that survives the storm.

Edited by Beatrix Kondo