"The reunion we waited nine years for — and while it does not quite land the magic it promises, the leads make it worth every complicated, overstuffed episode."
Kim Woo-bin and Suzy in the same drama again. That was all I needed to hear.
After Uncontrollably Fond left us absolutely wrecked in 2016, the idea of seeing them together again felt almost too good to be true. Nine years is a long time to carry a soft spot for two people who never got their happy ending on screen. So when Genie, Make a Wish was announced, I was not watching it because the plot sounded brilliant. I was watching it because I needed to see them make it out alive this time.
The synopsis
Ki Ga-yeong is a woman who cannot feel emotions — raised by her grandmother, functional, precise, and entirely disconnected from the world in ways she has long stopped trying to explain. A trip to Dubai to confront her estranged mother ends with her stumbling upon a magic lamp in the desert and releasing Iblis, a genie who has been sealed away for a thousand years. He promises her three wishes. She is largely indifferent. What follows is part fantasy mythology, part modern-day comedy, and part something much stranger — a story that keeps expanding until it is carrying more weight than it quite knows what to do with.
The cast
Kim Woo-bin (Iblis): He surprises here. The Iblis he plays is nothing like the brooding, dominant characters he built his early career on — there is a looseness to him in this role, a willingness to be genuinely silly, that feels like a deliberate departure. It does not always work within the drama’s tonal shifts, but it is interesting to watch someone try something different and mostly pull it off.
Bae Suzy (Ki Ga-yeong): She is better here than she has been in a long time. The emotionless psychopath role sounds like a limitation, and for most of the drama it is — but there is real craft in how she holds the stillness without losing the audience entirely. The desert crying scene near the end is the moment the whole character finally opens, and it lands harder for everything that came before it.
The story — and everything it tried to be
The premise is genuinely interesting. A woman who cannot feel anything meets a being who has spent centuries watching humans and decided they are not worth saving. The tension there — two people at opposite ends of emotional experience, slowly finding their way toward each other — had real potential.
The execution, though, is something else entirely.
The drama does not tell one story. It tells several simultaneously — the main leads’ romance, a mythology involving angels and genies and the nature of evil, an immortal child subplot, a second female lead and her grandmother, and five separate short stories about strangers whose wishes the female lead becomes entangled in. Each of these threads has moments that work on their own. Together, they fight for space in ways that leave none of them room to breathe properly.
It is the kind of writing that mistakes ambition for depth. More stories does not mean a richer story. And by the midpoint, the weight of it starts to show.
What works
The chemistry between the two leads is not something nine years erased — if anything, it has settled into something quieter and more interesting than it was in Uncontrollably Fond. The friction between Ga-yeong’s flatness and Iblis’s increasingly bewildered affection for her carries the drama through stretches where the plot loses its footing.
The cinematography earns its keep. The Dubai sequences especially have a visual scale that Korean dramas rarely attempt, and the production clearly committed to making the fantasy elements look as grounded as possible.
And Suzy’s final act — the moment she is finally allowed to feel everything at once — is genuinely moving in a way that makes you wish the drama had trusted her with that range much earlier.
What does not
The direction cannot decide what kind of show this wants to be. The male lead swings between ruthless god-figure and physical comedian sometimes within the same episode, and no amount of good acting fully smooths that seam. The supporting characters are underserved — sketched in rather than written, present to move plot rather than to exist as people.
And the mythology, for all its ambition, never quite coheres. The introduction of Iblis as a figure rooted in Islamic tradition — handled here as a fantasy device — may unsettle some viewers depending on their background, and the drama does not seem fully aware of what it is doing with that weight.
By the final episodes, the show is so busy resolving everything it set up that the emotional payoff arrives in a rush, a little breathless and not quite earned.
Final thoughts
Genie, Make a Wish is not the drama it could have been. The pieces were there — two actors with undeniable pull, a premise with genuine emotional possibility, and a production that cared about what it looked like. What it needed was a writer willing to make harder choices: fewer storylines, more time for the ones that mattered, and a clearer sense of what kind of story this actually was.
What it ended up being is a flawed, occasionally beautiful, often frustrating drama that is still, somehow, worth watching — mostly because of the two people at its center, who have not lost whatever it is that made us root for them nearly a decade ago.
Already seen this one? Let me know what you thought in the comments. And if you are looking for a fantasy romance that sticks the landing more cleanly, my other KDrama reviews might have something for you.
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