When the dust settles, this only makes it all the more terrifying to see it give rise to a leader in Yeong-tak, played with increasingly quiet menace by Lee Byung-hun, who is clearly not the best person for their community and everyone else’s long-term survival. In one of the early massive confrontations outside the apartment where residents try to evict people who “don’t belong there” with them, which goes about as poorly as one could expect, there is something darkly absurd about how everything falls apart with people scrambling in the chaos. There is also a darker humor to both films that, while more sharply focused in We Might As Well be Dead, also rears its head at key moments here. In this film’s eyes, humanity is always on the edge of such a descent. The speed with which violence and persecution can take hold of their minds serves as the point. Most critically, neither let their characters off the hook for this as much as it sets out to understand them. Both are built around people living in an apartment building that is supposedly the last refuge out there and the way the residents can quickly turn on anyone else, including each other, out of fear. In many regards, Concrete Utopia feels it would make a great double feature with this year’s hilarious and horrifying paranoia-filled satire We Might As Well Be Dead. However, it is soon apparent that not everything is what it seems in the community and their desperate attempts at salvation might be built upon a deception that calls the whole thing into question. They get sent out into the world, seemingly dooming them to death, while the “residents” stay behind and live in relative safety by comparison. Firstly, it involves kicking out anyone who is not a resident, which is already a flimsy designation from the start and only becomes even more pointedly meaningless throughout the film. The thematic core to it is that this world is soon built on the suffering of others. All of this is captured in simple scenes that still pack a bunch with one particular use of montage, eliciting a grim chuckle. Things are still incredibly dire, with the reality of limited food and resources looming over everything, though the residents soon begin to create a life for themselves. Where everything else has fallen, it has somehow remained standing. That is, except for the Hwang Gung Apartments. Every building has collapsed, and it seems like there is little hope left for humanity to survive this disaster. Set in Seoul, the film throws us into the aftermath of a massive earthquake that has decimated everything as far as the eye can see.
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