“My name is Loh Kiwan.”
There is confidence in that statement, but the same thing could not be said about the film for which it is the title. This is a film that has absolutely no clue what it wants to be. What begins as a serious and hard-hitting examination of the plight of a North Korean defector fending for himself in Brussels as he embarks on the long process of gaining asylum status soon devolves into a messy patchwork of different genre threads. By the end, the film has completely abandoned its hard-hitting social drama in favour of lumpy romance and gun-totting gangsters.
However, we don’t even have to wait for the switch to occur for the problems to begin manifesting themselves. Kicking off as a weighty drama, that revels in the miserable circumstances of its lead protagonist, this debut film by Director Kim Hee-jin is a laughably heavy-handed affair. Granted, thanks to its Netflix backing and the participation of top below-the-line talent (including the Oscar-winning editor and production designer of Parasite) it is a very handsome one and not just because of the presence of global superstar Song Joong-ki.
Song plays the titular Loh Kiwan, a North Korean defector who we first meet cleaning up his mother’s blood on a street in Northern China. We next meet Kiwan on a plane with a group of other defectors while he sneaks into Brussels with a fake passport as he attempts to seek asylum. The process proves slow and during the months he must wait for his court case he becomes a vagrant in a strange land, where he is preyed on by various characters, one of them being a South Korean woman who pickpockets his wallet, which contains his precious final memento of his late mother.
The production quality is so high, particularly in the Yanji sequences in China, that it almost offsets the dourness of the opening. However following the appearance of Kim Sung-eun as the pickpocket - who is an athletic sharpshooter turned drug addict - all its well-meaning social posturing goes out the window as the story devolves into a preposterous romance and a laughable saga of underworld sharpshooting gambling and gangsters in Belgium.
Song is fine in his role though tries a little too hard to deliver a serious performance, but he fares much better than Choi (who was terrific in the drama Beyond Evil) who is forced to muddle through the film’s weakest character.
As the film grows increasingly exasperating, even the most patient viewers will struggle to endure the film’s bloated 133-minute running time.
Song plays the titular Loh Kiwan, a North Korean defector who we first meet cleaning up his mother’s blood on a street in Northern China. We next meet Kiwan on a plane with a group of other defectors while he sneaks into Brussels with a fake passport as he attempts to seek asylum. The process proves slow and during the months he must wait for his court case he becomes a vagrant in a strange land, where he is preyed on by various characters, one of them being a South Korean woman who pickpockets his wallet, which contains his precious final memento of his late mother.
The production quality is so high, particularly in the Yanji sequences in China, that it almost offsets the dourness of the opening. However following the appearance of Kim Sung-eun as the pickpocket - who is an athletic sharpshooter turned drug addict - all its well-meaning social posturing goes out the window as the story devolves into a preposterous romance and a laughable saga of underworld sharpshooting gambling and gangsters in Belgium.
Song is fine in his role though tries a little too hard to deliver a serious performance, but he fares much better than Choi (who was terrific in the drama Beyond Evil) who is forced to muddle through the film’s weakest character.
As the film grows increasingly exasperating, even the most patient viewers will struggle to endure the film’s bloated 133-minute running time.
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