Another day, another strong Korean genre film. And it’s another one treading the territory of social atavism, where that country’s films and TV always make a firm impact, from Snowpiercer to The King of Pigs to Squid Game. South Korea’s entrant for the 2024 international feature film Oscar, Um Tae-hwa’s Concrete Utopia is a bitter satire on its recent housing bubble. It is set in a devastated, pallid, post-apocalyptic Seoul where only a single tower block remains standing. National icon Lee Byung-hun (Joint Security Area, Squid Game) is on fantastic form as the tyrannical “Delegate” running the show inside the building.
The exact nature of what has wrecked Seoul is vague, with an earthquake mentioned and a giant pyroclastic cloud on show in the disaster scenes. Nor does it make a whole lot of sense that Hwang Gung Apartments isn’t immediately overrun by the millions of survivors outside. But that’s all pragmatic short-cutting in the interests of a neat allegory for haves and have-nots (while the destruction itself is also maybe a metaphor for the catastrophic energy of an overheated property market). Lee’s Delegate Kim – appointed after preventing a fire – rallies the apartment holders to turf out any outsiders. Soon even the nurturing Min-sung (Park Seo-joon), who initially takes in a pair of refugees, is on guard against the “cockroaches” and convinced of his own God-given superiority.
The focus on inside and outside, normality and dehumanisation, is oddly reminiscent of The Zone of Interest, the winner of the 2024 Oscar for best international feature fillms. (And both films feature a very similar showcase retching scene.) But Um also combines capitalist-inequality needling with a more communistic kind of satire. The residents are supposedly equal but are all too eager to cede authority and responsibility to Delegate Kim. “You look sexy!” someone says of his bloodied face after he faces down the evicted riff-raff, and with rock-star charisma a viable post-apocalyptic social currency, a personality cult is soon in force.
Initially operating with the kind of disconcerting jollity with which Korean films often approach trauma, Concrete Utopia becomes increasingly tense and serious. The film not only casts light on the self-mythologising roots of power – as Min-sung’s meek wife Myung-hwa (Park Bo-young) digs into the Delegate’s past – but also how such lies eventually corrupt and pervert everyone in the vicinity. If George Orwell had had a career stint as a Korean estate agent, this is the kind of story he might have turned out.
• Concrete Utopia is on UK digital platforms now
