Dream starts from a punishment. Yoon Hong-dae, played by Park Seo-jun, is a footballer in trouble. After a disciplinary incident he is put on probation, and the penalty is a job nobody would choose: coaching a national team of homeless men headed for the Homeless World Cup. Some of his new players have never handled a ball. Others are difficult in ways that have little to do with football. Hong-dae is skeptical and cranky, and the film takes its time before it softens him. Director Lee Byeong-heon keeps the setup plain, and that restraint is the best early decision he makes.

The story is based on a true event, believed to be the 2010 Homeless World Cup, though the film never uses that origin as an excuse for its shortcuts. It moves between comedy and drama, and the seams show. Some jokes land harder than the sentiment around them. Park plays the coach’s thaw in small steps. The grump who learns to care is a stock figure, yet Park never seems to flip a switch, and that matters more than the script’s familiar outline. IU plays Lee So-min, a videographer whose own career is flagging, who films a documentary about the coach and his players. He is on the way down and so is she, and both will climb back. We have seen that arc before. The pairing still works, mostly because neither actor treats the other as a favour to be returned.

The film is at its best when the team takes over the screen. Kim Jong-soo, as Kim Hwan-dong, and Ko Chang-seok, as Jeon Hyo-bong, give the squad its first real texture, and Jung Seung-kil, Lee Hyun-woo, Yang Hyun-min and Hong Wan-pyo fill out a group whose bickering feels lived in. These scenes are looser and funnier than the ones built around the coach, and you can feel the film relax when he is not at the centre of the frame. Not everyone gets room, though. With this many players, a few are little more than a name and a quirk. The training sequences are predictable, and the sports-movie machinery is visible from the first whistle.

Dream stumbles when it reaches for sentiment. The documentary device could have given the film a second point of view, a way of asking who gets to tell the story of these men and why anyone watches. It mostly sits there. So-min’s own arc keeps drifting to the front when the team’s story is the more interesting one, and the middle of the film loses momentum as a result. Then comes the tempting offer that would pull Hong-dae away from the job. It is meant to be the central crisis. But the film has already told us what kind of story this is, so the choice carries almost no suspense. He sticks with the team and rejoins it for the tournament, and we never really doubt that he will.

Lee’s direction is competent and rarely more. The structure follows the sports-movie template closely, which is comforting and also limiting. The trip to Europe gives the film room to breathe, and the tournament scenes are the liveliest in the picture, partly because the stakes are finally physical rather than emotional. That the European leg was shot in Hungary in 2022, long after the Korean part, because of the pandemic, is not something a viewer would guess from the finished film.

The ending is the film’s most honest choice. The team does not win the Cup. Its performance in the final matches wins over the spectators and the documentary audience, and that is enough for the story to land. Back in Korea, the careers of So-min and Hong-dae are rehabilitated, and in the last sequence Hong-dae is seen re-entering major league football. The epilogue is tidy, perhaps too tidy after a tournament that had the nerve to let the team lose.

Dream opened in Korean cinemas on 26 April 2023 and took first place at the box office, then went to the New York Asian Film Festival as a centrepiece presentation that July before reaching Netflix worldwide. That is a respectable life for a film this modest in ambition.

It is a likeable sports comedy that does what you expect and, in its better scenes, a little more. Park’s measured performance and the rough charm of the team give it a pulse, and the clichés keep it from going any further. It is a better film among the players than it is beside the coach.