Lee Byung-Hun is Wicked Good in South Korea’s Oscar Hopeful

Unfortunately, the picture the film presents doesn’t always feel complete, but what it does focus on is usually a treat to witness, starting with its depiction of disaster. Through a few initial hints (and subsequently, via character-centric flashbacks), Concrete Utopia creates terrifying images of disaster. Its tableaus verge on the biblical, with smoldering ruins, city blocks being swallowed by cracks in the Earth, and civilians being mercilessly crushed by debris. Along with much of Seoul’s infrastructure, this cataclysm also consumes any sense of visual warmth in the visual palette. For the most part, it has a frigid quality, with blue-grey washes that not only reinforce the chilly elements to which the characters are exposed (it’s winter, and all heat and electricity have been knocked out), but they also serve as constant reminders of the harsh ethical conundrums permeating the story.

We’re introduced to this new world the morning after the quake, through the eyes of a young couple in the building, civil servant Min-seong (Park Seo-joon) and nurse  Myeong-hwa (Park Bo-young), who struggle with rationing food while taking care of a stranded mother and her young son. However, it isn’t long before their guests are forcefully expelled (along with all other outsiders), once Geum-ae (Kim Sun-young), a local resident who runs a women’s association, convenes a vote of the building’s permanent residents. Not even a day has gone by, and the apartment complex has already been divided financially (and thus, politically) into owners and renters.

When it comes to selecting a leader to enact this expulsion, the residents debate various questions of virtue and experience, but they eventually land on Yeong-tak, given his heroic actions when he helps put out a fire caused by the quake. Although disoriented at first—both by the smoke, and by the loss of his family—Yeong-tak accepts his role as the group’s new security leader, and everyone in the building begins referring to him by his new designation: “Mr. Delegate.” However, in spite of the virtues for which he’s chosen, Yeong-tak’s position feels rancid from the start. He’s a man tasked with enforcing an exodus of cold, hungry, and injured survivors from Hwang Gung’s crowded lobby, while the survival of those with incidental capital is all but ensured.

The pieces to build a biting satire are all in play. As the apartment complex begins to rebuild itself, and reorganize itself along utilitarian—the food you receive is proportional to your productivity—a hilariously tongue-in-cheek montage captures this renewal process, which the residents play to an invisible camera, as though they were creating a propaganda film. Concrete Utopia is hardly subtle about its aims, though this is perhaps why it’s mildly disappointing that it neither manages to be this tongue-in-cheek again, nor does it fully sketch out the parameters of its world (a task that appears to have fallen to its upcoming Netflix sequel, Badland Hunters).

With Yeong-tak in charge, a vigilante police force assembles in order to protect the complex, with the occasional reference to outsiders, but little sense of actual danger. On one hand, this mirrors populism’s affinity for drumming up phantom villains. But on the other hand, Yeong-tak’s vague gestures towards security seldom paint a picture of what fears are actually gripping the Hwang Gung residents, real or otherwise. After all, the world outside their walls truly is a dangerous one, and what little we glimpse of it on their food-finding expeditions tend to feel imposing, albeit for reasons seldom explored.

The broader premise can’t help but feel half-baked, even though the residents fearmonger about outsiders—whom they refer to as “cockroaches”—while the handful of wanderers we do see spread rumors about cannibalism at Hwang Gung in return. The point therein: it's easy to dehumanize one’s enemies in the name of survival, and the more Yeong-tak plays into this other-ing, the more swept up in his position of power he becomes. Granted, the ideology driving this divide is a flimsy one invented for the film—outsiders and insiders—since even pre-existing notions of class quickly cease to matter once only the residents remain on-screen and a barter system replaces traditional cash. With no ideology beyond base survival instinct driving the building’s groupthink, it’s hard to latch on to the quiet acts of resistance we see; what exactly are the film’s more conscientious characters resisting, except for the broad shape of “rules” and “order” brought down with an iron fist, with nary hint of economic or social motive? Some viewers might be quick to draw comparisons to South Korean Oscar-winner Parasite, with its architectural musings on class, but if anything, Concrete Utopia plays like a B-side to a Bong Joon-ho movie slightly lesser known in the West: Snowpiercer, whose violent, frigid, post-apocalyptic story involves a locomotive subdivided by economic strata. Despite hints of a similar set up in early scenes, with a security guard who laments being rejected from the building he’s worked at for years, no such structure ever emerges as Concrete Utopia’s guiding thematic (or dramatic) credo.

And yet, the film remains emotionally convincing despite being ideologically hollow. Director Um is nothing if not fiercely committed to his dystopian gimmick, for better or worse, and his actors follow suit. The otherwise slick and heroic Lee enters the story as a frayed everyman and undergoes a chilling metamorphosis as a wild megalomaniac, a trajectory that clicks firmly into place once we learn his backstory. This involves a revelation subtly telegraphed early on, but the specifics therein also hinder the story and dampen its thematic impact. As factions form (Min-seong and Myeong-hwa end up for and against Yeong-tak’s iron rule, respectively), the threats posed to Yeong-tak’s seat of power aren’t necessarily outcomes of his own actions, or even his outlooks. Rather, they’re the result of a slowly unfolding mystery that Um fails to fully integrate into the character drama, leaving the conclusion to all three characters’ arcs feeling somewhat disconnected.

However, despite what Concrete Utopia loses in its character drama, it maintains a constant sense of scale and calamity, given how deftly it integrates images of sprawling disaster into practically every scene. No matter what happens, it’s always couched in the movie’s specific and calamitous context. Um ensures that this extreme becomes a natural part of the unfolding drama, and practically second-nature to the characters, until the audience gets used to the jagged edges of fallen pillars and crumbling roadsides too. The disaster, while palpably shocking at first, all starts to feel a bit dull and normal by the end of the movie’s 130 minutes, as though we’ve lived several weeks and months alongside the characters, and accepted this new scenario, where taking extreme actions might be necessary.

There’s little chance anyone watching will agree with Yeong-tak—he and his goons are far too militant to ever be aspirational—but for a brief moment, even the madness and violence starts to feel like a normal or acceptable part of life in this hellish vision of Seoul, despite our moral objections. It’s an unsettling lesson in retrospect, even if Concrete Utopia never sells its drama to the fullest: none of us are immune to the charms of fascism if we can be convinced, even on a subconscious level, that some evils might be necessary.