It begins with Ji-woo, a woman whose life feels stuck in slow motion. You can see the exhaustion in her eyes from the first scene—a messy apartment, an unopened letter, a birthday she forgot was hers. She’s just surviving, not living. Then one night, she finds this old brass lamp in a junk shop—dusty, forgotten, almost humming with some secret energy. The shopkeeper tells her it’s “not for sale,” but there’s this look in his eyes, like he knows she needs it more than she understands. She takes it home anyway.
She rubs it, and she does not see smoke, and she does not hear thunder. Just silence. Suddenly, however, there is a flicker of lights, and this man, this genie, is there, standing on her living room floor, with bare feet, and looking more like a man than a god. His name is Kai. He’s not what you expect. Nobody is doing any flashy powers or booming voice, just quiet eyes, as though they had seen centuries of broken promises. He also informs her that she has three wishes, but they have a cost, but not money, not years of her life, but something emotional. Something that she is not quite aware of.
The first thing she desires is trivial she does not want to remember somebody. And as she says it you can hear the agony in her voice. Kai grants it with a whisper, but there’s a sadness in his smile, like he knows what she’s giving up. She wakes up the following day, being lighter, yet emptier. His name, his looks are forgotten, but the sore aching in her heart is here to stay. And then I realized that freedom is not always forgetting. It’s another kind of loss
Her second wish hits harder. She wants to experience love, to be actually loved, at least once. And Kai—he hesitates. And one can read it everywhere on his face. Genies are not supposed to break the rules: then keep out of it. But it is not about the rules the movie is about but about hearts. So, he grants it. And this is where things get dirty, human and agonizingly beautiful.
They begin to spend time together- eating with each other, discussing dreams and even laughing. This is one episode when they are sitting on the roof during the city lights she tells him that, it feels so much like love and she might have already exhausted the third wish. And he simply gazes at her, wanting to do what he must and what he wants to do. You know because you can see he is falling in love with her as well. Slowly. Hopelessly. Against his will.
Nevertheless, all magic stories are cruel. The more she loves him the weaker he is. Every hour they spend together bleaches him, draws him nearer to losing his reality. And this is one of the haunting scenes when she tries to touch his face, and her hand is nothing but smoke. Her face is also changed--it is not the expression of fear anymore but the understanding. In this world love requires sacrifice. And other times, it is the one you had not planned.
When she gets to her last wish, she is in tears not because she desires more but because she realizes what she has lost. She does not even want money or fame, or even to have him remain. She wishes for him to be free. You have been long enough in giving others what they desire, she says, give me a chance to give you something. And then she says that, and I tell you it is as though the world stopped.
The final scene broke me. His smile is gone, now it is soft, almost human, and he says, then my wish already came true. And as he passes away, there is only left the shimmer of light, like dust in the sunshine. She is left alone and she is the one holding the lamp, however there is a calmness in her eyes this time around. It is the sort of an ending which does not provide closure, it provides silence. The type that causes you to sit there so long after the credits are done, and you see everything all in your mind.
Genie, Make a Wish is not really about magic, it is about wishing. It is the type of wishes that people make when there is no one to listen to. The wish to heal. The wish to be loved. The wish to let go. What struck me so much about it was the excruciatingly truthful detail of the money it takes to get what you want. Since, at times, although you get the wish, you do not get it, in patrolling what is broken in, just learn how to live with it.
I did not actually shed tears when it was over. I simply sat there and looked at the image on my screen, and I wondered, maybe we are all a bit like Ji-woo, and we are groping in the dark looking to know that some one or some thing might actually listen and hear what we can not even speak ourselves. And perhaps, by luck, we discover our own genius, not the kind that makes us wish, but the one that assists us in remembering how to dream once more.
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