Annotating Concrete Utopia: The Questions This Film Asks
A reading of Concrete Utopia as a film about disaster, community, survival ethics, class boundaries, and whether utopia can exist.
Now that our son has gotten comfortable spending time at his grandmother's place nearby without us, my wife and I have found occasional space to catch a movie again. Before we had kids, my wife was the kind of person who watched nearly every theatrical release; I would make a point of seeing anything worth calling a major film, and we'd often go to late-night screenings together. For a long stretch we couldn't set foot in a theater, but we've slowly found our way back — a quiet, small pleasure. (Though the ticket prices have gotten a bit painful.)
Last week we finally got around to seeing Concrete Utopia. Oppenheimer was still playing, along with the summer tentpole Smugglers, but we went with Concrete Utopia — the ratings were high enough to tip the scales. (Oppenheimer is on the list as soon as we can manage it.)
Concrete Utopia
Genre: Thriller, Disaster
Screenplay: Eom Tae-hwa, Lee Shin-ji
Director: Eom Tae-hwa
Source: Webtoon The Cheerful Outcast
Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Park Seo-jun, Park Bo-young, Kim Sun-young, and others
Runtime: 130 minutes
I tend to ramble when something grabs me, and since the story has been out long enough that most people know it, I'll skip the plot summary. Instead, let me explore a few key themes. This contains spoilers — think of it as a richer set of annotations for those who've already seen the film.
A World Zoomed In
Concrete Utopia is a film that cuts away context and zooms in hard. Think of it like a book that skips the narrative build-up and shows you only the highlights, in close-up.
Disaster films typically either explain the cause of the disaster or find humanism in its aftermath — people discovering empathy in extremity, or a heroic figure leading others through. Audiences respond to that.
But this film does not explain why the disaster happened. One day, out of nowhere, a massive earthquake hits, and the lone surviving Hwangung Apartments becomes the setting. The film drops the names of real places — "Seoul Station" — but says nothing about what happened to the government, the military, conditions outside Seoul, or whether international aid is coming.
Technically speaking, even a major earthquake's effects rarely extend beyond a city, let alone a country. External help would normally arrive. But the film abandons that formula entirely. Like a theater experience that amplifies the sensation of isolation, Concrete Utopia trains all attention on Hwangung Apartments and its immediate surroundings.
Outsiders and Residents
Early in the film, survivors who have gathered near the apartment complex are shown coexisting with the residents. But food is limited and space cannot accommodate so many people. Strangers occupying the building lead to a resident being stabbed, and a fire breaks out. The building's resident association head, Geum-ae (Kim Sun-young), calls a residents' meeting to drive out the non-residents and expel the outsiders.
An interim representative is elected — Yeong-tak (Lee Byung-hun) — and the First Rule is established: "The apartment belongs to its residents. Only residents may live here." Those without residency are pushed outside, where most eventually freeze to death. The film posits an extreme cold snap in Seoul: temperatures below minus twenty degrees. Without electricity and shelter, exposure is fatal.
Early in the film they're called "outsiders"; as it progresses, they come to be called "cockroaches." The residents draw a sharp line between themselves and those beyond it, turning the outsiders into radical Others. In this process, they continuously cultivate a sense of having been chosen, hostility toward outsiders, and through that hostility, internal cohesion.
The film distills the consolidation of collective egoism — or survivalism — through the division between inside and outside the apartment, along with the conflicts and eventual collapse that follow, into a 130-minute runtime. Director Eom Tae-hwa said he "wanted audiences to understand and feel empathy for the selfishness and evil of ordinary people."
Follow the Rules or Leave: The Survivor's Code
The film keeps asking questions. What would you do? With government and everything else collapsed, what reliably raises your survival odds is firm leadership. Creating an external enemy to forge internal solidarity is the oldest trick in politics.
And so many viewers find themselves emotionally resistant to Yeong-tak (Lee Byung-hun) and yet instinctively rooting for the apartment-side when the whole group of residents comes under attack from outsiders. The film relentlessly prods at that subtle gap.
Hwangung Apartments slides into a strange system: the communist mechanism of rationing coexists with the capitalist principle of differential reward for labor, while residents who secretly shelter outsiders are surveilled and rooted out. Like conditions during the Holocaust, many are forced to choose between personal survival and coexistence with others.
Park Seo-jun's character keeps murmuring, "It can't be helped." In the extremity of the situation, the things everyone treats as normal and does as a matter of course can become evil — this is the banality of evil. The director, too, probably has no definitive answer. History is only what those who survived record from the outside — it's hard to simply say that Hwangung Apartments' residents were "wrong."
The moment where a resident who secretly harbored outsiders is told: "Since they're residents too, we'll forgive you — but you must kneel before everyone and shout your apology" — gives the scene a strange quality of a people's tribunal, while also showing that unlike the Holocaust, they are being offered a choice: follow or leave.
The Faint Camaraderie That Forms, and the Face of Selfishness
As the film progresses, people find an uneasy comfort in the rules and order taking shape at Hwangung Apartments. When the scavenging teams venture out and find food, a flicker of relief and weak camaraderie settles in — until, quietly, the director poses another question in the moment the group raids a store for supplies.
A man takes a child hostage and raises a gun to protect his goods. Objectively, the Hwangung people are the mob here — the ones trying to seize someone else's property. Yet with the justification of "how dare they take a child hostage" and "we have to save our person," they brutally attack the store owner and make off with the food. The camera lingers on the store owner's wife and daughter, clinging to him as he falls.
A queasy feeling. Something like saving your own but killing a civilian in the process. Flip it around: how is raiding a well-stocked store to survive any different from what the outsiders are doing — attacking Hwangung Apartments to escape the cold and survive? The fragile rapport the audience has built with the Hwangung residents — or with Park Seo-jun's character and his ambiguous goodwill — may amount to nothing more than Stockholm Syndrome.
The Inverted World, and the Apartment as Utopia
The film opens with a documentary-style montage of Korea's apartment history. Watching it, our own lives — so bound up in apartment ownership — flash by in fast-forward. In the film, the apartment is simultaneously survival space, class symbol, community, and virtually the whole world. Zooming immediately into Hwangung Apartments, the film cuts away a cross-section of that apartment republic and shows it unfiltered.
It pokes at the absurd reality where your social standing is determined by which apartment you live in and how many square meters you own. A resident who reclaims her unit after it was initially seized says: "We moved in here three months ago. It took my husband and me 23 years to cross that bridge. Did the people in that apartment ever treat us like human beings? Wouldn't even let us near the place — always going on about school districts and treating us like we didn't matter." The Palace Apartments next door — now rubble.
The main couple, Myeong-hwa (Park Bo-young) and Min-seong (Park Seo-jun), receive a visit from a child and her mother (or grandmother) early in the film — apparently Palace Apartments residents, arriving in mink coats. We inevitably recall the many stories of apartment-complex parochialism that have made the news, and find ourselves confronting the symbol of desire in Korea's class-stratified apartment republic. The film also raises the question of whether you're an owner or a tenant — same dynamic.
The New Year's festival held at Hwangung Apartments is equally unsettling. A celebration amid collapse feels grotesque and strange. The camera projects the silhouettes of dancers and drinkers onto the apartment walls — and asks what a toast means in a ruined world. Then Lee Byung-hun sings. It is Yoon Su-il's "Apartment" — almost vomited out:
"Nobody home, nobody home, your apartment, so alone."
Is the apartment our utopia?
What Is a Leader?
Who is the film's protagonist? By the ending it feels like it might be Myeong-hwa (Park Bo-young) — but the film is too heavy for that reading. The narrative engine is Yeong-tak (Lee Byung-hun), and the bulk of those 130 minutes form a thriller centered on the truth and illusion, the lies and reality of what he is.
Every character is multifaceted; characters where good and evil coexist generate a three-dimensional magnetism. Yeong-tak, in Greek-mythological terms, is a figure carrying the seeds of tragedy — containing madness. He is not truly a resident of this apartment, yet he throws everything into its service. Deceived, he commits murder, then deceives himself. More than mysterious, he evokes a desperate kind of pathos.
Sometimes I think: if we were plunged into hell and had to claw our way through it, this might be exactly the kind of figure best suited to lead.
The opposing figures — Myeong-hwa (Park Bo-young) and Do-gyun (the character who, trampled and betrayed, denounces everyone and chooses suicide) — carry the banner of righteousness but lack the power to enforce it. Democracy, if the majority has turned toward cruelty, is only a train hurtling toward evil.
If — hypothetical — the initial residents' vote had come out in favor of coexisting with outsiders, I suspect Yeong-tak would have given everything to the survival of that more inclusive community, working with the reality he was handed.
What would I have chosen, had I been the leader? Like Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, perhaps I too am a survival machine — and might have decided that everything can be sacrificed for the survival of the individual, or the extended individual that is a community. Or maybe, like Park Seo-jun's character, I'd have adapted to a degree and tried to maximize my gains within the system. Most people in the theater were probably having similar thoughts.
The ending shows, from Seoul Station, people who chose not to live by Hwangung Apartments' rules — surviving in their own way. The director is not saying "this was the better path." Because if these people had had a modest shelter of their own — an apartment (established power) that hadn't collapsed — they might have done anything to protect it too.
The Concrete Universe
The film left me wanting more — and, it turns out, there's a bigger picture. A post-screening search revealed that multiple works based on Kim Sungsoo's original webtoons are being adapted for film or streaming. The individual stories don't directly connect, but the sense of a shared universe is compelling.
Watching the film, I kept thinking of José Saramago's Blindness and its sequels — because Concrete Utopia poses the same kind of questions about human nature. I don't have any desire to see it again — it touches places in the conscience that are uncomfortable to disturb. But that's also what makes it a good film, one worth sitting with. My final verdict: worth seeing, worth contemplating.