Concrete Utopia Review: A Darkly Comic Disaster Thriller That Digs Deep Into Human Nature

In Cormac McCarthy’s 2022 novel The Passenger, a character muses that, when a nuclear bomb set the sky above Hiroshima on fire, those who survived the blast didn’t immediately connect what had happened to the war, but rather assumed that the world had ended. The destruction we see in Um Tae-hwa’s Concrete Utopia feels similarly apocalyptic: When an earthquake rips through the heart of Seoul, the streets split open and buildings crumble, largely reducing the entire city to rubble in a matter of seconds. From this moment on, we never find out what’s happening outside of the city, with the film effectively keying us to the perspectives of a community of survivors for whom the world is essentially their immediate vicinity.

In the midst of all this destruction, Imperial Palace Apartments is the only building in Seoul left standing. To help them survive their grim new reality, the residents elect Yeong-tak (Lee Byung-hun) as their leader after watching him bravely put out a fire. Wiry and wide-eyed, Byung-hun is perfectly cast as the sort of political strong man that we’ll soon see his character grow into—a figure whose gruff machismo can’t quite disguise the desperation lurking beneath it.

Under Yeon-tak’s authority, teams are formed to handle the duties of post-apocalyptic living, from food distribution to medical care to waste management. We’re given a guided tour of each department in a series of Wes Anderson-esque tableaus, with the politically savvy Geum-ae (Kim Sun-young) providing cheerful commentary while other residents smile into the camera. It’s an at once amusing and unsettling sequence that feels almost plays like a propaganda film, as everyone seems to be trying a little too hard to convince themselves that things are fine.

When survivors from across the city begin showing up at Imperial Palace Apartments, the residents are initially willing to give them shelter from the harsh winter conditions. But resources soon begin to run thin and, after a tense meeting and an anonymous vote, the decision is made to banish the outsiders. The refugees are driven out, a fence is erected, and a security force is set up, armed with homemade weapons and led by an enthusiastic Yeong-tak.

That initial meeting represents the dark heart of this incisive social thriller. As they debate whether to send a group of helpless people off to die, the residents’ conversation is shot through with lines that subtly reveal their true feelings. While they use pragmatic concerns about food and fuel to justify their decision, the conversation keeps coming back to the fact that this is their home, not anybody else’s. They worked hard to afford these units, they took out the loans, they signed the deeds. Never mind that the banks they borrowed from now lie in ruin or that that some of them only moved in a few weeks ago, dodging disaster by nothing but dumb luck.

Yeong-tak is gradually elevated into an almost cult-like figure and the building soon becomes a police state where residents are forced to continually reaffirm their loyalty to their towering, grey homeland while denouncing outsiders as “cockroaches”. This rising tension leads to a number of brutal, spectacular set pieces—including a climactic siege that’s like something out of Les Misérables—followed by a quiet, reflective epilogue in which we’re left to consider how easily warm, fuzzy concepts like “home” and “belonging” can turn us into monsters.

It’s easy to be a good person, or to feel like one at least, from the comfort of home. We might see our ethics and values as integral parts of ourselves, but as written by Um and Lee Shin-ji, the darkly comic and consistently revealing Concrete Utopia suggests that, without four walls around us to prop them up, most of these morals would crumble into dust.