“My Identify is Loh Kiwan” is a downbeat Korean melodrama peppered with violence and victimhood and adorned with too many trials and tribulations for its personal good.

Author-director Kim Hui-jin stuffs a TV cleaning soap opera season’s price of over-the-top challenges, unhappy flashbacks, ugly injustices and an unlikely romance in adapting Hae Ji-Cho’s novel for the display screen.

It’s watchable however totally predictable.

We lose monitor of what it’s our titular hero is escaping and by no means are allowed to see the enchantment in fleeing to racist, immigrant-bashing Brussels, Belgium. I assume between the EU pink tape, the Chinese language efforts to cowl up corruption and crime, drug abuse, faux identites and sketchy workplaces that rent undocumented migrants and all these flashbacks to inform us about two useless moms, they simply didn’t have the time.

We meet Loh Kiwan (Track Joong-ki) as he’s weeping, cleansing blood off a road.

Subsequent suppose we all know, he’s on board a jetliner with a number of other people who’ve paid to be taken from China and smuggled into Belgium, coached by their “mule” to not look sketchy and to only say “Je ne parle pas français” to the customs officers at Brussels airport. On the best way from that airport, Loh Kiwan tries to pay a driver in blood-stained U.S. {dollars}.

“Dangerous luck.”

Loh Kiwan is fleeing North Korea by the use of China. And since Koreans lengthy native to China have been utilizing that dodge to backdoor their manner overseas, he’s immediately beneath suspicion. He tells a customs officer, and the Korean translator who got here to his assist, his unhappy story.

Up so far, we’re allowed to marvel if he killed anyone, if he’s Chinese language pretending to be Korean and simply saying “Comrade” loads to “move” for a Folks’s Republican operating from persecution and famine.

However as we see or not less than really feel implied in flashbacks, his mom sacrificed every thing to get him throughout that North Korean border into China and later onto that aircraft. An uncle urged him on, regardless of the associated fee. Who wouldn’t be moved? Who’d wish to escape North Korea solely to get caught in China?

Loh Kiwan will get a listening to date for the possibility to land a piece Visa. It’s months away, and all he has are a couple of bloodstained dollar {dollars} to tide him over.

“I don’t exist right here,” he complains, in subtitled Korean (and French) or dubbed into English.

He’s bullied out of a hostel, locked out of a public restroom the place he hopes to winter, crushed up by xenophobes and at last robbed by a fairly punk as he’s handed out in a laundromat.

That’s how he meets Marie Lee (Choi Seong-eun), a sullen, well-kept junky in open revolt towards her father (Jo Han-chul) however in debt to her supplier (Waël Sersoub).

Our hero lastly turns robust man with the thin Chinese language/Belgian girl. He desires that damned pockets again. It isn’t lengthy earlier than their fates are locked as we take a tour by the working poverty of unlawful immigrants, excessive stakes playing on an arcane European sport and the one factor these two have in frequent — shedding their moms.

As one unhealthy circumstance after one other piles up on his life, she invests in his wellbeing. As she struggles together with her personal demons, he invests in hers.

And each flashback takes us again to the trauma they’re each shouldering, which grows extra dire with each little bit of retelling.

For a narrative with this a lot overwrought tragedy hooked up to it, I discovered “My Identify is Loh Kiwan” an oddly unemotional “weeper.” One can sympathize with the immigrant’s plight and nonetheless shake your head on the theatrical nature of the tragedies, which come near “Oh come on now.” The layers of harm and self-destruction added to it by way of flashbacks overwhelm you with cleaning soap opera suds.

The performances are participating however not affecting, and the standpoint of the story is sort of xenophobic itself. A South Korean movie avoiding condemning its belligerant failed-state northern neighbor, condemning China with out flinching after which slamming Europe and Europeans for bigotry, and easily being leery of taking on this man with no marketable expertise and no grasp of the language as a result of they and we’re imagined to be imagine his more and more fraught and over-the-top story?

It appears a bit a lot.

The unhappy saga sort of plods alongside a predictable path — courts, violence, love — with solely a few gentle surprises in retailer within the third act. However no, there’s nothing remotely shocking within the finale.

Ranking: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse

Solid: Track Joong-ki, Choi Seong-eun, Jo Han-chul and Waël Sersoub.

Credit: Scripted and directed by Kim Hui-jin, primarily based on a novel by Hae Ji-Cho. A Netflix launch.

Operating time: 2:12