Started off as a brutal look into the struggles in immigrating from North Korea. The journey was tough to watch as Loh lived off the grid with his mother in China while she worked to raise enough money for them to escape to some European safe haven. Things don’t go exactly as planned when they are discovered by the Chinese police and his mother is killed while they’re attempting to flee.

Loh makes it to Belgium but continues to encounter some very difficult hardships. Though his encounters with the locals always escalating to violence, on their part, was heavy handed and unrealistic, his struggles for work and warmth and a roof over his head were authentic.

The part where this story goes off the rails is with Marie. A woman whose rebellion against her father over the death of her mother involves doing drugs and being the pawn of a Belgium gangster. It’s not love at first sight with these two being that she steals his wallet, which has all he has left of his mother and what little money he earned from her death. But soon their lives become entangled when she promises to get his wallet back and gives him a tip which results in a job.

There’s nothing more to their love story except a shared meal over which they didn’t talk but spent the entire time stuffing their faces, but somehow they came out of that being deeply in love, with Loh willing to do everything from OD on drugs, face off with gangsters and risk his ability to gain citizenship to save Marie. It was utterly ridiculous.

The movie seemed to have spent more time on the “love” story and Marie’s drama than on what should’ve been the focus of the story, Loh’s journey to freedom. In the end he finally gets citizenship in Belgium and in a voiceover states that he faced “many storms to get there. It would’ve made for an excellent story if we’d actually seen it. Instead his story became about saving Marie, then giving up his citizenship to go be with her on some island in the South Pacific. Needless to say I was left a bit perturbed by this waste of two hours.

I will say the Korean actors were great in this, but the premise advertised is not what this turned out to be.