Eight Movies in One Music Video: TWICE's 'What Is Love?'

By YUJU · August 25, 2026 · Updated September 9, 2026

Plenty of people can list the movies in TWICE’s “What Is Love?” — the video has been screenshot, gif-ed and side-by-side’d for years. The list is the easy part. The interesting question is why a song about not knowing what love feels like would be built almost entirely out of other people’s movies, and why those eight.

This is a Spotlight piece, where we take one video or one live stage at a time and go through it properly. The previous one walked through a video staged out of Baroque and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. This one is built out of a video store.

The references are the premise, not the garnish

Here, the film references do more than add visual texture. The video cannot be separated from its sources because the song is about secondhand love.

When the single arrived in April 2018, the Korea Herald described the members as naive young women who have learned about love through books, movies and dramas without having actually experienced it. Park Jin-young wrote and composed it. Once you know that premise, the video stops being a game of spot-the-reference and becomes the literal content of the song: a group of people who have only ever seen love on a screen, acting out the only versions of it they know.

That’s why the recreations are so faithful. A wink wouldn’t work. The whole point is that these women are copying, carefully, because copying is all they have.

What’s actually in there

Eight films, cast across the nine members:

The casting is documented rather than fan-inferred — the full breakdown sits on the song’s Wikipedia entry, and the Travolta-Thurman dance and Emma Stone’s yellow dress are recreated closely enough that nobody has ever needed to argue about them.

A reference with distinct Korean context

One of the eight selections is especially useful for understanding the video’s Korean context.

Love Letter is a 1995 Japanese film by Shunji Iwai — and in Korea it is not a deep cut at all. It opened there in 1999, and the Korea Times reported in January 2025 that its more than 1.15 million admissions remained the record for a non-animated Japanese film in Korea. It arrived just as Japanese films were being legally imported for the first time after decades of a ban on Japanese popular culture, which made it a cultural event rather than simply a hit. Its snowfield call became one of the film’s most recognizable images in Korean coverage.

The Love Letter choice makes the source list culturally specific rather than a generic catalogue of Hollywood romances. For a song about learning love secondhand, whose secondhand it is matters.

Why it outlasted the joke

A concept this cute could have aged into a novelty. It didn’t, and the choreography is a large part of why — the chorus is built on plain, repeatable shapes that read at any size, which is the engineering behind a song still being covered years later.

The song also took Song of the Year at the 2018 MAMA, the group’s third win in a row — a run built on exactly this kind of record, where the hook is simple and everything underneath it is carefully made.

The neatest touch is the framing. The recreations don’t run as a standalone reel — the video keeps cutting back to the group at a sleepover, watching movies on TV, with a mock commercial break dropped in the middle. So the films are being watched inside the video by the same people performing them, which stages the song’s premise a second time: love arriving through a screen, in a living room, secondhand.

The question in the title never gets answered, and the structure is why. Nobody in this video falls in love. They watch.

For what’s landing next, the comeback calendar tracks every confirmed release, and the rest of this series lives on the Spotlight page.