Review | Netflix movie review: My Name is Loh Kiwan – Song Joong-ki plays a North Korean defector in Belgium-set drama that is more a schmaltzy romance
- The movie follows a North Korean asylum seeker – played by heartthrob Song Joong-ki – fall in with a woman embroiled in Belgium’s criminal underworld
- Director Kim Hee-jin seems overly keen to sidestep the defector’s legal minefield in favour of a schmaltzy romance, where the forces of attraction are weak
2/5 stars
A North Korean defector seeking asylum in Belgium falls in with a wayward young woman who is embroiled in the city’s criminal underworld in My Name is Loh Kiwan, the first feature film from writer-director Kim Hee-jin.
Sidestepping the details of his daring defection entirely, My Name is Loh Kiwan picks up the action as our eponymous protagonist arrives in Brussels on a flight from China, where he finds himself in immigration limbo while his application for refugee status is being processed.
Left to fend for himself on the wintry streets of the Belgian capital, Kiwan falls foul of a number of random ne’er-do-wells, and is eventually mugged.
Losing the only thing he holds dear – a battered wallet containing some money and his only photograph of his dead mother – Kiwan turns to the police, where CCTV footage reveals the culprit to be another Korean, Marie (Choi Sung-eun), a former Olympic markswoman turned drug addict.
Marie’s plight is one of the more ridiculous elements of the plot. A rich Korean ex-patriate with an estranged father (Cho Han-cheul), she has fallen in with Waël Sersoub’s shady gangster, who plies her with drugs and forces her to compete in illegal sharpshooting contests in his evil underground lair.
During her more lucid moments, Marie helps Kiwan get a job at a meatpacking plant, where he passes himself off as Korean-Chinese, but things turn sour when he must prove to the Belgian authorities that he is an authentic North Korean refugee.
Where Kim’s fledgling feature falls down is in its inability to decide what it wants to be. Clearly, there’s a fascinating drama to be told about the plight of those fleeing across the 38th parallel, and the bureaucratic red tape that obstructs their flight to freedom.
Too often, however, Kim seems overly eager to sidestep Kiwan’s legal minefield in favour of a schmaltzy romance, where the forces of attraction are never any stronger than the couple’s shared nationality.
Elsewhere, Belgium – one of Europe’s least offensive destinations – is portrayed as a hostile and unwelcoming world of vice and visa issues, making a relatively drab and underwhelming backdrop for Kiwan’s generically existential crisis about his place in the world and sense of self-worth.
My Name Is Loh Kiwan will start streaming on Netflix on March 1.
