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Pierce Conran

1/5 stars
Lead cast: Bae Suzy, Kim Woo-bin
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.
Iblis believes that humans are innately corrupt and thus lesser beings. Through the many wishes he has granted for his many masters, he strives to show God how selfish the human race is. In Ka-young’s case, it may take some time to prove this, as she does not seem particularly interested in making any.

Ka-young is initially frustrated by Iblis, who pops up out of nowhere and follows her back to Korea. If only she had used one of her wishes to make him go away, which would have made for a mercilessly short show, rather than the torturously long and convoluted one this is.
A lot happens in 13 episodes, but it is difficult to pinpoint what the story is, and many of the tangents are just pure drivel.
One involves a dog who is granted three wishes. He wishes to become human and turns into dashing Daniel Henney (Confidential Assignment 2: International), who, with the help of his equally handsome chauffeur (Kim Ji-hoon, The Haunted Palace), wants to be reunited with the family that abandoned him.
One of Ka-young’s wishes is to make her grandmother young again, which brings Ahn Eun-jin (Hospital Playlist) into the equation as the younger Pan-geum, pretending to all her friends and neighbours that she is someone else.

The gag drags on for far too long and, while Pan-geum’s arc does have an emotional conclusion, the age change makes no difference – it is just an excuse for clunky comic filler.
Genie, Make a Wish opens with an animated prologue about the origins of genies, creations of God who became arrogant, went to war with angels and later came to hate the humans that God made to replace them.
Noh Sang-hyun (Pachinko) plays a significant role as Iblis’ angel rival Ryu Soo-hyun. The pair routinely beat each other up in rote CGI dust-ups in the skies or down in the seas, but the character and his various vengeful ploys never find a way to fit into the story.
But the show’s greatest misstep is avoiding the one department that matters most – romance. It attempts to mine humour out of the emotionless Ka-young, but this only succeeds in making her burgeoning romance feel utterly inert.

Kim seems to be deliberately dialling up the absurdity of classic K-drama tropes to craft a breathless collection of colourful scenes; look no further than the meme-ready image of Iblis eating bibimbap while flying on his magic carpet, flanked by fighter jets.
But it does so at the expense of narrative and character – much like When the Stars Gossip, another big-budget, overegged misfire gunning for the title of worst K-drama of 2025.
Genie, Make a Wish is streaming on Netflix.


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Bae Suzy and Kim Woo-bin star in this convoluted and disappointing Korean drama from Kim Eun-sook about genies, angels and magic


Bae Suzy and Kim Woo-bin star in this convoluted and disappointing Korean drama from Kim Eun-sook about genies, angels and magic.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Bae Suzy and Kim Woo-bin star in this convoluted and disappointing Korean drama from Kim Eun-sook about genies, angels and magic

Bae Suzy and Kim Woo-bin star in this convoluted and disappointing Korean drama from Kim Eun-sook about genies, angels and magic