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Telling a story of two strangers who meet by chance in an elevator, TheIntimate follows their journey through the day and night (which doesn'tseem to end by the way), as they discover about each other, and aboutthemselves in the process. Kinda like Before Sunrise in its treatment,the lovers, nameless except known as Boy (Jo Dong-Hyuk) and Girl (SungHyun- Ah), play the usual courtship mind games, playing coy, beingaggressive, taking turns to bust each others chops as they fall intoeach other's arms.

Sounds like your typical romance movie, no? At certain points the usualelements are there, like plot devices romanticizing a bench and handdrawn pictures, and the mushy things lovers whisper to the ears ofanother. Clichéd highlights include one needing to leave the countrythe next day, and the other being engaged to someone else, and now bothof them, by Fate, are presented a chance to do something totallydifferent. But in this story, it managed to take aged old questions ofdoubt, and weave a compelling movie around them.

The basic question will be what is love. Is it supposed to be longdrawn and lasting a lifetime, or is the feeling actually made up ofshort passionate bursts? And after being with someone for so long, isit a question of being afraid to leave the comfort zone of familiarity,or does it boil down truly to faithfulness? The nagging fear of beingabout to marry someone, and then you meet your soulmate – what do youdo? Blame the person for turning up in your life too late? And it issomehow true that the longer you know someone, the more faults that youwill find, and the question is, will you be able to live with thosefaults, or do you prefer to live in that constant crest of emotionalhighs and bailing out when the slightest inclination of such faultsstart to rear its head?

It helps that both leads are eye-candy, as they offer you a chance toanswer some of those questions yourself if you were to put yourselvesin their shoes and be offered the same set of temptations – here's whatyou currently have, and here's what someone else can offer. What wouldyou do? If there is a gripe, it'll be the one-dimensional fiancé thatsomehow has to be demonized in order to make the other option all themore appealing.

It's a relatively engaging movie, though watching the out takes whilethe end credits rolled made you appreciate the movie's direction alittle more. While those scenes which were left out may be seen as moreinteresting, somehow I felt it would have disrupted the pace anddragged events rather than having it all compacted into a screenduration of 24 hours. It would have been a totally different look andfeel altogether, but probably not for the better.