'Made In Korea' Movie Review: A Seoul-Less Drama Made For Algorithms

Made In Korea is quite the clever title for the film it turned out to be. The most obvious reading is that the film was made in Korea, but it indicates the coming-of-age story of a lady named Shenba (Priyanka Mohan), giving us the sense that the real Shenba was made in Korea after she migrates there. And then there is the pun. After Shenba makes her way to Seoul, she finds work in a mansion as a 'maid', looking after the old lady who lives there. But there ends anything one can remotely term clever about this film.

Even if its title is not, Made In Korea is the most perfunctory a film could have been, given how it’s made to cater to algorithms; five minutes into the film and you begin to hear all the obvious buzzwords you’d expect from a film about a girl obsessed with Korea and the Gen-Z fantasy it represents. Of course, there are phrases like K-pop and K-drama being thrown around, but you soon see Shenba trying to eat a bowl of Maggi with chopsticks as well. We see her learning the Korean language early on, even though it does not fit in with the plot of the film. In a school play, Shenba plays the role of a Tamil princess who travels to Korea, but apart from that, we get no sense of why this girl from a remote village becomes so obsessed with all things Korean.

In a silly scene, as Shenba tries to secure a loan to visit her dream land, she tells the bank manager that there’s no real reason behind her love for Korea… “real love doesn’t require an explanation,” she tells him. Maybe the bank manager does not require one but as the viewer, we are genuinely curious to understand how she came to love a distant culture, even though she lives in a house that does not even have access to the Internet (she needs to stand atop an elephant to get some network).

It’s not that such a person is impossible to find in reality, but the film doesn’t even try to get us to care about the only aspect of her personality that makes her interesting. Does she simply want to visit Korea, or does she see herself migrating there? What dreams will she follow once she gets there, or is she just happy to be there, even if it means abandoning everyone? None of these questions Shenba finds important enough to answer, let alone explain the conflict that arises from such a major life decision.

Even if we agree to set aside any interiority to a character like Shenba’s, we still do not see anything resembling an organic flow of events that gets her to Korea. Which means that once she lands up there, it doesn’t ever feel like life’s finally happening to her. How does she make a new friend? She just walks into him. How does Shenba find people who play musical instruments? She just walks into them. How does Shenba land up in jail? She just walks into a bar, gets drunk on Soju and punches a random Korean. The connective tissue between scenes is so awkward and implausible that you feel like Shenba reading out pages of her life’s screenplay would have felt more believable.

And it only gets worse. The idea of starting a restaurant happens way too conveniently and the film takes its audience for a ride when it asks us to make giant leaps of faith in the name of suspension of disbelief (a lady in the film fakes being bedridden for decades!). Garlic-flavoured kimchee makes an appearance along the way, as does the idea of Indian kindness being something of a novelty to Koreans. Even the usually charming Priyanka Mohan struggles to make us feel anything more than indifference and we sit through the film with the distant coldness of getting lost in a foreign country. Cultural appropriation seldom feels as inappropriate as it does in Made In Korea.