“My Name is Loh Kiwan” is a downbeat Korean melodrama peppered with violence and victimhood and adorned with too many trials and tribulations for its own good.

Writer-director Kim Hui-jin stuffs a TV soap opera season’s worth of over-the-top challenges, sad flashbacks, ugly injustices and an unlikely romance in adapting Hae Ji-Cho’s novel for the screen.

It’s watchable but utterly predictable.

We lose track of what it is our titular hero is escaping and never are allowed to see the appeal in fleeing to racist, immigrant-bashing Brussels, Belgium. I guess between the EU red tape, the Chinese efforts to cover up corruption and crime, drug abuse, fake identites and sketchy workplaces that hire undocumented migrants and all those flashbacks to tell us about two dead mothers, they just didn’t have the time.

We meet Loh Kiwan (Song Joong-ki) as he’s weeping, cleaning blood off a street.

Next think we know, he’s on board a jetliner with several other folks who have paid to be taken from China and smuggled into Belgium, coached by their “mule” to not look sketchy and to just say “Je ne parle pas français” to the customs officials at Brussels airport. On the way from that airport, Loh Kiwan tries to pay a driver in blood-stained U.S. dollars.

“Bad luck.”

Loh Kiwan is fleeing North Korea by way of China. And since Koreans long native to China have been using that dodge to backdoor their way abroad, he is instantly under suspicion. He tells a customs officer, and the Korean translator who came to his aid, his sad story.

Up to this point, we’re allowed to wonder if he killed somebody, if he’s Chinese pretending to be Korean and just saying “Comrade” a lot to “pass” for a People’s Republican running from persecution and famine.

But as we see or at least feel implied in flashbacks, his mother sacrificed everything to get him across that North Korean border into China and later onto that plane. An uncle urged him on, no matter the cost. Who wouldn’t be moved? Who’d want to escape North Korea only to get stuck in China?

Loh Kiwan gets a hearing date for the chance to land a work Visa. It is months away, and all he has are a few bloodstained greenback dollars to tide him over.

“I don’t exist here,” he complains, in subtitled Korean (and French) or dubbed into English.

He is bullied out of a hostel, locked out of a public restroom where he hopes to winter, beaten up by xenophobes and finally robbed by a pretty punk as he’s passed out in a laundromat.

That’s how he meets Marie Lee (Choi Seong-eun), a sullen, well-kept junky in open revolt against her father (Jo Han-chul) but in debt to her dealer (Waël Sersoub).

Our hero finally turns tough guy with the skinny Chinese/Belgian woman. He wants that damned wallet back. It isn’t long before their fates are locked as we take a tour through the working poverty of illegal immigrants, high stakes gambling on an arcane European sport and the one thing these two have in common — losing their mothers.

As one bad circumstance after another piles up on his life, she invests in his wellbeing. As she struggles with her own demons, he invests in hers.

And every flashback takes us back to the trauma they’re both shouldering, which grows more dire with every bit of retelling.

For a story with this much overwrought tragedy attached to it, I found “My Name is Loh Kiwan” an oddly unemotional “weeper.” One can sympathize with the immigrant’s plight and still shake your head at the theatrical nature of the tragedies, which come close to “Oh come on now.” The layers of hurt and self-destruction added to it via flashbacks overwhelm you with soap opera suds.

The performances are engaging but not affecting, and the point of view of the story is kind of xenophobic itself. A South Korean film avoiding condemning its belligerant failed-state northern neighbor, condemning China without flinching and then slamming Europe and Europeans for bigotry, and simply being leery of taking in this guy with no marketable skills and no grasp of the language because they and we are supposed to be believe his increasingly fraught and over-the-top story?

It seems a bit much.

The sad saga kind of plods along a predictable path — courts, violence, love — with only a couple of mild surprises in store in the third act. But no, there’s nothing remotely surprising in the finale.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse

Cast: Song Joong-ki, Choi Seong-eun, Jo Han-chul and Waël Sersoub.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kim Hui-jin, based on a novel by Hae Ji-Cho. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:12