Concrete Utopia Foretells The Hellscape That Awaits Us

“WHATEVER WE DO, there is no need for guilt, and no need for pride,” a tyrannical leader who has risen from amongst commoners, says in response to desperate pleas, in a scene from Concrete Utopia. It’s a sequence that gives autocracy utterance and semantic shape. Both despotic rule and service demand the abandonment of a value system. A system that otherwise holds onto checks like empathy, reason and humanity. Set in post-apocalyptic Seoul, Concrete Utopia, much like its oxymoronic title, satirises the idea of urban housing as a sovereign ruin. A ruin that many conflate with entitlement, for the simple ability to shut its doors to the ‘outsider’. This is a genre disaster film with the layered commentary of a studious essay on infrastructural decay… decay that reduces humanity to vague sides of a shared, crumbling wall. Good and bad are just seasons you are born into.

The film begins with a montage of towering residential complexes, ominously hugging the Seoul skyline. Once considered functional instruments, these clustered, highly commoditised blocks of negligible space now represent a dire race to acquire block-sized privileges. Apartments, as shown in this footage, are now ‘won’ by lotteries. It’s a curious way to set up a film, a political preface so concise you wouldn’t half-mind the documentary that seems likely to follow. Except Concrete Utopia choses to fictionalise crisis as a way of shattering our ideas of security and entitlement. Seoul is suddenly levelled by a massive earthquake. Survivors flock to Hwang Gung apartments, the only residential complex left standing in its wake. But much like life, not everyone who desires shelter will be allowed to have it.

Park Seo-joon plays Min-Seong, a naïve resident of Hwang Gung. It’s through his shell-shocked constitution that we witness a pocket of Seoul become a despicable, violent allegory for the rest of humanity. Seong’s fragility is counteracted by Yeong-tak (Lee Byung-hun), the acidic leader of all the ensuing chaos. Assigned the name ‘Delegate’ after he heroically stops a fire, Tak is urged to lead residents in what is colloquialism for an iron-hand administration. The Delegate soon acquires strongman status, enacting with brute force, resisting with cold blood and exiling citizens and victims without as much as a flutter of the eyelid. Infrastructural collapse, the film says, can lead to civilisational rot. But collapse here is merely a keyword that could represent both moral and literal frameworks. Lose either, and the concrete anatomy loses all sense or permanence and function.

Directed by Um Tae-hwa, the film follows in a long line of South Korean titles that are centred on class disparities, inequality and broader urban decay. But unlike its peers, there is real grimness about Concrete Utopia, a literal chokehold on how punishing and brutal anarchy can be. The violence, the tough choices are unrelenting, and while there are points of entry for social debate, the film chooses to stay vague about its own moral stance. The Delegate, while brutal, is driven by historical wrongs. A flashback right in the middle of the film offers a shattering sociological twist. The kind of post-assumption revelation that makes it hard to not reconsider your own biases about the characters who choose violence when compassion seems easier.

The film’s grandeur of rubble is matched by unsparing stress and tension. Hwang Gung faces jeopardy on a rolling basis. Sometimes it’s food and supplies, other days it’s outsiders pleading for a share of the provisions. It’s like watching humans shed their skin one brutalising, classist and exclusionary act at a time. Concrete Utopia is written to play out like a thriller… not necessarily to expose its miscreants but to casually illustrate the wells we dig while living out of the pits of discrimination and inequality. The earthquake is only really the trigger for the unrecognised catastrophe that is human greed and bigotry. It takes a fallen wall to expose the room full of prejudice.

Concrete Utopia was South Korea’s official entry to this year’s Oscars. And though it works perfectly well as a genre survival thriller, its greatest accomplishment is its knock-on commentary about the exclusionary nature of urbanity. The world’s cities are unliveable yet remain highly sought after as podiums of privilege and prestige. Every other week you hear of a swanky new high-rise swept up by the city’s elite. Almost as if these rarefied establishments ensure breakaway states run by self-governing principles. Anyone privy to the tyranny of RWAs in India, would find Concrete Utopia acutely relatable. Everyday functions aren’t as violent or reprehensible, but the tactics of exclusion and licence find echo in the fictionalised hell that this South Korean film offers. It’s not the kind of nimble, deftly observed masterpiece that Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was, but it’s yet another Korean film that doesn’t treat its politics as a commemorative afterthought. Instead it uses the angst to build a mass of chaos, violence and depravity that looks surreally, one shiver of the earth away.

Concrete Utopia is streaming on MUBI.