After triumphantly tackling psychological thrills with The Glory, K-drama giant Kim Eun-sook returns to the world of fantasy romance with Genie, Make a Wish, her second Netflix series on the trot.
However, rather than recapture the charm of fan favourites such as Secret Garden and Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (aka Goblin), this bloated concoction represents a colossal misfire.
Guiding us into this confounding journey of a beautiful psychopath and the cocky genie she awakens are Bae Suzy (Doona!) and Kim Woo-bin (Our Blues), but even their combined star wattage isn’t luminous enough to get us through this misbegotten folly.
Bae is Ki Ka-young, a young woman raised in the countryside by her doting grandmother Oh Pan-geum (Kim Mi-kyung, Welcome to Samdal-ri).
Ka-young is a psychopath who enjoyed dissecting frogs and harming animals as a child, and likely would have grown up to become a serial killer were it not for Pan-geum’s empathetic intervention.
As an adult, Ka-young is still unable to feel emotions, but she keeps her nose clean out of respect for her grandmother. She runs a woodworking studio as well as a car repair shop, although these are merely hobbies as she is fabulously wealthy thanks to her knack for stock trading.
One day she travels on a first-class ticket to Dubai to visit her mother, who abandoned her. Following their disappointing reunion, Ka-young takes a tour of the desert, where she stumbles over an old lamp.
Out pops Iblis (Kim), a genie who has been trapped in the lamp for close to a millennium as punishment for past actions revealed much later.
Confronted with magic for the very first time, Ka-young is not fazed in the slightest and proceeds to berate the befuddled genie, who is duty-bound to offer Ka-young three wishes.
