Let’s get this out of the way: If you’re looking for healthy relationship dynamics, Affair is not the show for you. Wan and Pleng share exactly one horny brain cell, and they don’t share nicely. If you’re looking for thoughtful and nuanced writing…Affair is also not for you. The plot is, to put it kindly, bizonkos. The character dynamics are pretty one-note as well—Wan is jealous and possessive, Pleng is guilty and repressed—so the script feels repetitive, despite the melodrama of it all. If you’re looking for something well-made and aesthetically pleasing, um, well, Affair looks pretty good at least, by GL standards, though a bit sterile for my taste. The soundtrack unfortunately is pretty bad, and it is playing CONSTANTLY. I swear to god a single conversation will have as many as four different BGM tracks play one after the other (and always the same four tracks, on endless loop). It’s as if the sound editors are allergic to silence.

But at the end of the day, there is really one reason to watch Affair, and that is the mesmerizing set-your-screen-on-fire chemistry of Lookmhee Punyapat Wangpongsathaporn and Sonya Saranphat Pedersen. Is that enough reason to recommend it? For me, yes. They are masters of the “I am devouring this woman head-to-toe with my eyes” stare. And, while the script might be objectively bad, it is very good at engineering situations where Wan looks at Pleng like she’s a big steamy bowl of noodles while their lips hover two inches apart. The tension is simply unreal.

The best parts of Affair are when the tension is at its highest, when it’s about how desperately down bad these women are for each other, and nothing else. As soon as other characters start to intervene, it suffers. I can accept one boring man being used as a pawn in Wan and Pleng’s jealousy-revenge schemes, but three?? Ultimately, with the focus on the main couple so tight, and the other characters so irrelevant, Affair feels limited—confined by the source material and the eight-episode format. It’s hard to believe these women have lived more than a decade apart from each other without apparently having any other romantic relationships with women, or making any friends. Their lives feel so empty aside from their devotion to each other.

If you can surrender to the fantasy, though, and ignore the fact that if this were real life, Wan and Pleng should be seeking psychological help, Affair is a fun romp, mostly thanks to the talents of Sonya and Lookmhee. I hope their next project is worthy of them!