Concrete Utopia from Director Um Tae-hwa has been selected as Korea’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Oscars, and with good reason. Inspired by a Webtoon titled ‘Cheerful Outcast’, Director Um uses this disaster thriller as a means of exploring how social order is both maintained and deteriorates when tensions mount in the face of natural disasters and ever-increasingly finite resources.
The film starts in the immediate aftermath of a massive earthquake that has reduced the world to rubble. Decimated is a better word to encapsulate the scale of the destruction as the film does not make clear how far the ruins stretch. Instead, the focus of the film centers on Hwang Gung Apartments, the last standing building. The apartment is described by one of the residents as “being chosen”. Naturally, as time passes following the disaster, ‘outsiders’ start coming into Hwang Gung Apartments trying to escape the extreme cold. Before long, the apartment residents are unable to cope with the increasing numbers. Help being a thing that does not come, the residents form an unsteady alliance and establish rules that will allow them to live out the disaster: establishing rations, and democratic systems, and in the face of threat to their survival elect to evict from the apartment block all those who did not live there pre-disaster – a banishment which naturally results in those unfortunate souls freezing or starving to death. Director Um chose an apartment block as the setting for his film as he felt that apartment living is “universal for Koreans” and therefore that it was the most fitting for Korea.
Focusing on the moral universe, and exploring the very real (and frightening) manner in which people/humanity (may) change in extreme circumstances, when they are overcome with fear. As the situation evolves to become a question of survival vs dignity, people have to naturally make a decision as to which side they will allow to prevail. Fortunately Director Um also brought humour to the screen to compensate for the difficult subject matter and increasing brutality/unkindness.
This is disaster genre film, but unlike other such films that have come before, Concrete Utopia begins with a blank canvas, and skips the backstory leading up to the disaster. The disaster itself is not in fact important to the story, only that it happened is. The introduction to each character is dealt with in a gradual way, drip feeding information that does not interfere with the film’s overall narrative. As the film progresses, viewers are introduced to lots of different characters, but the main focus is placed on three apartment dwellers. Firstly, we have had Yeong-tak (Lee Byung-hun), who without regard for his safety heroically deals with a fire that results in his election as leader, seemingly having all the qualities that would make a good leader. Secondly, we have husband and wife team made of up Min-sung (Park Seo-jun) and Myung-hwa (Park Bo-young) who both deliver poignant performances, interestingly without a large amount of dialogue. The couple respectively win the viewers sympathy as they do their best to survive in the face of events that would bring out the best and worst in human society, with Myung-hwa really being the moral compass of the film. Her true character coming forward may be a slow burn prompted from the differences she sees in her husband, but it nevertheless is a relatable, human development. It was interesting to observe in particular how the language used changes from descriptions of non-apartment dwellers from “outsiders” at the start, to the more divisive term of “cockroaches” towards the end, which comes about almost without the viewer really noticing.
What the viewer takes away from this film in terms of morality will depend on their own perspectives. Whilst the viewer is unlikely to conclude that the film had a happy ending, there was a sense of warmth and hope that people can be good to each other – and better still that it is possible to band together in face of tragedy.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Trailer: