Genie, Make a Wish (2025) [+]
Oct 15 2025
Genie, Make a Wish is a South Korean romance drama on Netflix running 13 hour-long episodes.
Ki Ka-young (Bae Suzy, seen her in several dramas and movies and love her every time even if sometimes the material was not that great) is a woman living in a small farming town with her grandmother Oh Pan-geum (Kim Mi-kyung). Ka-young is a psychopath in that she doesn't empathize with others and doesn't really feel any emotions herself but with the help of grandmother and the village she's grown up with rules of how to live her life (and she's quite OCD about her routines) and an ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions.
One day she finds a lamp, a magic genie lamp. Iblis the genie (Kim Woo-bin) has been waiting a thousand years for Ka-young, or at least one of her incarnations, to appear and find the lamp. She somehow imprisoned him for a thousand years because her wishes back then were selfless. Iblis has been around since Man was born and has been trying to prove that Mankind is corrupt and he's always been right as anyone who gets three wishes uses them selfishly.
He makes a bet with Ka-young that the next five people they meet (one turns out to be a local dog) will get three wishes and if more of them use their wishes selfishly then he gets to kill her otherwise he will bow his head to a human and forfeit his life to the angel Ejlael (Noh Sang-hyun) who's a local real estate mogul hanging around waiting for Iblis to mess up so he can finally kill him and win the duel they've been having for thousands of years.
So Iblis hangs out with Ka-young also trying to get her to use her three wishes. Their sparring slowly turns to attraction…
This is a good romantic movie with a good amount of comedic bits because a psychopath can be funny in the same way a space alien can be funny: they have an outsiders view of how weird and inconsistent humans can be and they can shortcut things because they don't know social conventions.
Bae Suzy is quite good having like no expression throughout the series (except in the last episode when she gets a taste of experiencing human emotions). Even as a psychopath she's rather charming and I've mentioned before I have a thing for that character type (beautiful, emotionless, but not evil). In contrast Kim Woo-bin has to really act it up and be larger than life to balance the duo.
The main plot kind of climaxes at the end of the 12th episode or the beginning of the 13th episode and the rest is sort of wrapping up to a happy ending. I'm a bit sad about the doomed romance between Ka-young's best (and only) friend Choi Min-ji (Lee Joo-young) and Ka-young's grandmother wished into her younger self, Lee Mi-joo (Ahn Eun-jin). Lesbian romance is kind of rare and this one was nice as a subplot.
Overall a great series.
Ki Ka-young (Bae Suzy, seen her in several dramas and movies and love her every time even if sometimes the material was not that great) is a woman living in a small farming town with her grandmother Oh Pan-geum (Kim Mi-kyung). Ka-young is a psychopath in that she doesn't empathize with others and doesn't really feel any emotions herself but with the help of grandmother and the village she's grown up with rules of how to live her life (and she's quite OCD about her routines) and an ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions.
One day she finds a lamp, a magic genie lamp. Iblis the genie (Kim Woo-bin) has been waiting a thousand years for Ka-young, or at least one of her incarnations, to appear and find the lamp. She somehow imprisoned him for a thousand years because her wishes back then were selfless. Iblis has been around since Man was born and has been trying to prove that Mankind is corrupt and he's always been right as anyone who gets three wishes uses them selfishly.
He makes a bet with Ka-young that the next five people they meet (one turns out to be a local dog) will get three wishes and if more of them use their wishes selfishly then he gets to kill her otherwise he will bow his head to a human and forfeit his life to the angel Ejlael (Noh Sang-hyun) who's a local real estate mogul hanging around waiting for Iblis to mess up so he can finally kill him and win the duel they've been having for thousands of years.
So Iblis hangs out with Ka-young also trying to get her to use her three wishes. Their sparring slowly turns to attraction…
This is a good romantic movie with a good amount of comedic bits because a psychopath can be funny in the same way a space alien can be funny: they have an outsiders view of how weird and inconsistent humans can be and they can shortcut things because they don't know social conventions.
Bae Suzy is quite good having like no expression throughout the series (except in the last episode when she gets a taste of experiencing human emotions). Even as a psychopath she's rather charming and I've mentioned before I have a thing for that character type (beautiful, emotionless, but not evil). In contrast Kim Woo-bin has to really act it up and be larger than life to balance the duo.
The main plot kind of climaxes at the end of the 12th episode or the beginning of the 13th episode and the rest is sort of wrapping up to a happy ending. I'm a bit sad about the doomed romance between Ka-young's best (and only) friend Choi Min-ji (Lee Joo-young) and Ka-young's grandmother wished into her younger self, Lee Mi-joo (Ahn Eun-jin). Lesbian romance is kind of rare and this one was nice as a subplot.
Overall a great series.