‘Concrete Utopia Review: A South Korean Disaster Film Is Like ‘Earthquake Meets ‘Lord Of The Flies
97 times out of 100, the film makes its moral judgment for us. Yes, films like The Conformist, Taxi Driver or Her are characterized by disturbing ambiguity. But when was the last time you saw moral ambiguity in a genre film? Even the Mad Max films, in their ghostly cruelty, draw a clear line between nobility and betrayal, frantic heroism and lawless selfishness. But Concrete Utopia is a dystopian film with a difference. In this year's Best International Feature Oscar race, a South Korean film puts its characters in desperate, terrifying life-or-death situations and then refuses to tell audiences what it thinks of them. It's a fragmented, blood-soaked drama about the will to survive, reminiscent of a cross between Earthquake and Lord of the Flies. The funny thing is that you watch a movie and think: “What would I do if I was in this movie?”
Director Um Tae-hwa begins with a documentary montage of large, rectangular apartment buildings in Seoul, while a news anchor offers a fleeting reflection on how apartment life has changed South Korean society. We are told that apartments were once a means of purchasing a larger home. Now they have become simply a goal sought by citizens who enter the lottery to buy them. The film's title refers to the cityscape of Seoul, where residential complexes rise like rows of children's building blocks. But it also implies what would happen if only one of them remained.
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An earthquake occurs when a tsunami comes out of the ground; The film is so brutal and moving that we almost expect a sea monster to emerge from the bottom. The entire city has been reduced to smoking ruins, and this is not just an urban disaster, but an apocalyptic event. Seoul will be destroyed, and perhaps the rest of South Korea as well. (Government? Media? Everything gone.) What we see is a wasteland represented by digital images and beautiful backgrounds: huge piles of rubble, concrete walls, concrete walls full of cables, corpses and debris: the city from the inside, from the outside.
But in the surreal solitude, something strange happens. In the center of Seoul there is a single residential complex - one of the newly built beehives. Called Hwang Gung Apartments, it looks like a large hotel with two 30-story rectangular wings converging in the middle into a circular center. The apartments themselves are modest, but relatively spacious. Residents consider this place a refuge, and now it truly is. This is the lifeboat they find themselves in, their refuge from disaster. Hmm, with the modern apartment complex that David Cronenberg used in They Come From Within as a frighteningly unsettling and deceptive cocoon.
In the first scene, which takes place immediately after the earthquake, the natural impulse is to let other people in and help them. But there are not enough resources. (The city is overrun with refugees). So the villagers come together and make decisions based not just on survival, but on class privilege, which we in the movies have long dismissed as corrupt. They do not allow outsiders to enter. Only those who have an apartment can stay.
At first we thought: “How inhumane.” However, there is a fundamental moral logic at work here. If the residents turn the complex into a fortress, seek shelter there, look for food (look for tents, hide in the rubble, attack) and use all outsiders as “cockroaches” to be avoided, they will persist. and they will live. If they don't and the aliens arrive like zombies in a zombie movie, chaos will ensue and no one will survive.
And since there is a moral logic to this , apartment residents don’t just live by it. They turn it into a code, a belief system, a kind of religion. They choose leader Kim Young-tak (Lee Byung-hun), who at one point, in a fit of rage, puts out a fire below (the basis of his supposed heroism) and rises to the occasion. . Organize them into a survival group. Known as Delegate, Squid Game's Lee exudes an appetite reminiscent of Willem Dafoe and a sly sass reminiscent of Elon Musk. He promotes a "we first" approach to apartment residents by leading them through rituals ("It's Hwang Goon time! Yay, Hwang Goon! Let's go! Hello!") and late-night karaoke parties at night.
In flashbacks, we see Kim Young Tak's violent past, making him a controversial character. Suffice to say, he's an identity thief who doesn't actually own his apartment. Our sympathies remain with the film's two other main characters: Min Sung (Park Seo Joon from Miracle) and Myung Hwa (Park Bo Young), a kind couple with benevolent passions; She is a civil servant and he is a nurse with silent compassion. But Concrete Utopia, like Lord of the Flies, is a parable about how you can lose empathy.
Ultimately, this is a film about the primal need for home and money. The film is an allegory for modern South Korea (and perhaps many other places) where it is becoming increasingly difficult to return home. Kim Young Tak shouts into a megaphone, waking up the residents with a call-and-response chant: “Our apartments...” (“Our apartments...”), “...belongs to the residents!” (...belongs to the residents! ) As the battle cry goes: “Without justice there is no peace!” But that's the point of "Concrete Utopia," a film that asks, precariously, dramatically, and sometimes even as an educational disaster film, what a house is worth.
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