Set in the last residential tower block remaining in Seoul, this South Korean genre film puts the city’s haves and have-nots into deadly competition
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.
