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- But “ Concrete Utopia ” is a dystopian disaster movie with a difference. This year’s South Korean entry in the Oscar competition for best international feature, it places its characters in a desperate, scary, do-or-die situation and then refuses to tell the audience what to think about them.
Nov 12, 2023 · ‘Concrete Utopia’ Review: A South Korean Disaster Film Is Like ‘Earthquake’ Meets ‘Lord of the Flies’. Um Tae-hwa's dystopian drama is set just after an apocalyptic earthquake in a Seoul...
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- A polished disaster drama with a bleak and brutal view of human nature
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- Verdict
By Katie Rife
Updated: Dec 8, 2023 8:21 pm
Posted: Dec 8, 2023 8:08 pm
Set in the last remaining apartment block in Seoul after an apocalyptic earthquake ravages the city, South Korea’s official Oscar entry for 2023 uses a single high-rise building – the “concrete utopia” of the title – as a stand-in for nothing less than all of human society. In director and co-writer Um Tae-hwa’s cynical view, people are selfish, violent creatures that are prone to cruelty when we feel even the slightest bit threatened. Put another way: Concrete Utopia is Lord of the Flies with a view.
In snappy, quick-cutting vignettes that map out the system that keeps the Imperial Palace running – if not necessarily a sense of geography in this claustrophobic space – Concrete Utopia builds a functional, immersive world. Every day, Yeong-tak and his men venture out into the rubble of the city searching for food and fuel, which is rationed out and distributed by a committee. Similar groups handle medicine, waste disposal, and even recreation for residents – and only residents. Outside the walls lie piles of frozen corpses, but the people living in the Imperial Palace have convinced themselves that they’ve been “chosen” to survive.
At its best, Concrete Utopia prompts the viewer to ask themselves what they’d do if they were given choices like the ones the characters must make. Some of its observations have a touch of black humor to them: One scene sees a gaggle of well-fed aunties chiding a starving refugee for her tone. At its worst, it’s just obvious, like the shot of a “Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself” sign on the wall of an apartment whose residents are being beaten for harboring “outsiders.”
Concrete Utopia is a disaster movie about human nature. Set in the last apartment block standing in Seoul after a devastating earthquake, this polished, character-driven drama is a whole lot of movie, in both good and bad ways.
- Katie Rife
Dec 7, 2023 · South Korea’s submission for Best International Feature Oscar follows the residents of a building who were spared in a freak disaster—only to create their own insular nightmare.
- Nick Schager
- Entertainment Critic
Dec 7, 2023 · Murder, mayhem and moral collapse follow all too quickly when an apocalyptic earthquake flattens Seoul in “Concrete Utopia,” South Korea’s entry in this year’s Oscar contest for best ...
Dec 9, 2023 · Rather than an action-packed disaster movie, “Concrete Utopia,” South Korea’s Oscar entry for international feature, plays like a brutal indictment of human nature, both at its most...
Concrete Utopia is hardly the first disaster movie in which panic trumps morality. But this vision of a “utopia” smashed to pieces is more disturbing and believable than most.
Sep 22, 2023 · Concrete Utopia: a moralising disaster movie. Director Um Tae-hwa explores human behaviour in the wake of an earthquake that decimates Seoul with a Ballardian story set in a post-apocalyptic apartment complex. 22 September 2023.
