CONCRETE UTOPIA - Mark Reviews Movies

Concrete Utopia, 815 Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 14, 2023

Depending on the perspective and one's need for a living space, South Korea is on the verge of or currently undergoing a housing crisis. On that level, Concrete Utopia, which sees all but one apartment building in Seoul destroyed by an unprecedented earthquake, serves as a very specific allegory about the extremes of the need for and lack of housing.

Co-writer/director Um Tae-hwa's film, though, quickly goes deeper into its political metaphor, raising uneasy questions about how easily and naturally a society could slide into, broadly, authoritarianism and, more specifically, fascism. It doesn't take much, beyond one legitimate crisis and a series of imagined ones—often cooked up by the people who want power or, once they have it, like that power too much to even consider giving up on it.

The earthquake and its consequences on the infrastructure of the city here are terrifying enough. The human aftermath might be more frightening, because there's actual precedent for it.

A brief montage explains the recent developments in the economy of residential rental spaces in the country, as people scramble to find apartment units in the big cities and upgrade from meager spaces. It's stopped, though, when the ground in Seoul literally rises up to the height of a tall building and begins an unstoppable roll across the length of the city. After the chaos, only one building, a complex of rental units called Hwang Gung Apartments, stands in near-perfect condition amidst the unlivable rubble.

Everyone who lives there is lucky, then, including Min-sung (Park Seo-jun), a civil servant, and his wife Myung-hwa (Park Bo-young), a nurse. Like everyone else, we suppose, the two have to ration the little food they have in their apartment, barter for bottled water and canned goods with other residents, and hope that some rescue effort is made as soon as possible. As time passes and no help arrives, people start to worry that aid from any outside source might not be possible, considering how little they know about the full extent of the devastation caused by the earthquake.

Led by apartment association head Geum-ae (Kim Sun-young), a group of residents bands together to figure out how best to create systems within the building to provide that help. They need a leader, though—someone who can inspire a little hope and a good amount of obedience from the residents. That person, apparently, is Young-tak (Lee Byung-hun), a man who lives in one of the units with and cares for his ailing mother. More importantly for his role as the building's leader, Young-tak didn't think twice about rushing into a burning apartment, after getting the firehose to function. That can't be said of Min-sung, who stood frozen holding the hose, or anyone else in the building. Who better to lead than a genuine hero?

That's the basic setup of both this isolated, insulated society within the apartment building, as Young-tak and his de facto board establish a food bank and a health clinic (which Myung-hwa oversees) and a police/scavenger force, and the plot. Another vital detail, though, is the new government's first act of and in power.

Some non-residents have made their way into the building, primarily because of some act of kindness or guilt on the part of certain residents—Min-sun and Myung-hwa, who take in a mother and small child who come knocking on the door one night, included. Should they be allowed to stay, or should the administration expel these outsiders from the building, toward an almost-certain fate of scarcity, and into the harsh winter nights?

From here, Um and Lee Shin-ji's screenplay, based on a web comic by Kim Soon-Nyung, reveals its truer intentions, which probe more about society and the individuals within it than the film's initial metaphor about the housing crisis, and these characters. Rules are established, with the first one being that the building belongs to its residents and only them. The police unit, led directly by Young-tak, becomes a force with which to be reckoned in its first act in charge. The same team becomes desperate as they scour the surrounding rubble in search of water, food, and supplies, leading to rumors among other survivors that the residents are killing people and turning to cannibalism.

The main point, perhaps, is the way Young-tak and some others so quickly and easily dehumanize and villainize the very concept of an "outsider," repeatedly referring to them as "cockroaches" and other terms, while starting a passive campaign for residents to fear them and, later, an active one to root out any non-residents who might remain in the building. Lee's performance is hauntingly charismatic and frighteningly authentic as Young-tak, a man who has a big secret of his own—one that makes him a hypocrite and makes his policies/actions almost seem like acts of selfish self-preservation.

Everyone more or less goes along with everything—out of agreement, out of fear or pragmatism (Min-sung exists somewhere on that spectrum, as all of his actions and moments of inaction, including a harrowing flashback to him in the middle of the earthquake, show), with only secret pushback possible (Myung-hwa helps one man defy the no-outsider order). It's fascinating to watch how the central metaphor of Concrete Utopia evolves, but the film's focus on the human and political drama unfolding here means the stakes don't remain symbolic for long. A natural disaster of such magnitude might never happen, but a societal one as depicted here increasingly seems too close for any comfort.

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