Starring Lee Byung-hon, Park Seo-joon, Park Bo-young, Kum Sun-young, Park Ji-hu, Kim Do-yoon

Directed by Um Tae-hwa

Palace Apartments in the last building left standing in Seoul after a colossal earthquake. The residents struggle to survive and rally behind Yeon-tak (Lee Byung-hun), a resident who will do anything to protect the others.

The opening sequence of Concrete Utopia is a remarkable piece of tone setting. Jaunty public information films give way to clear eyed urban melancholy which is subsumed under an inconceivably vast, and never explained, disaster. We don’t know if the world is still there. We never do. All we see is the apartments and what people do to stay there.

Lee Byung-hun is impossible to look away from here, and Yeong-tak evolves from a mysterious, well-meaning individual to a despotic leader. There’s a lovely, jet black visual gag where he leads a team of scavengers in a rallying cry, which gets a little more tired and ragged every time it’s delivered. He blossoms in the spotlight the way a weed does, spreading to cover every available space, every possible exit. He leads the apartments but he also traps them in his shadow. The second half of the movie peels every element of his role away and by the end of the movie we see that he’s a monster with context but not justification. It’s an incredible performance that anchors the movie and at its worst moments overshadows it. That’s not a criticism, the film is a dissection of cults of personality among others. But it does mean that some other characters get lost in the churn a little. Park Ji-hu’s Hye-won gets some good work to do, but her role is as much a catalyst as a character.

That being said, the film is designed to explore what happens when a charismatic leader overshadows and curdles the work of better people. That never lasts but it always hurts and that bruising is explored by the film with compassion and exhausted, determined pragmatism.

Verdict: Concrete Utopia is a hard watch but all great dystopian fiction is. It’s deeply funny, relentlessly brutal and ends in the most hopeful way possible. If you liked it, I’d also recommend Badlands Hunter on Netflix. It’s not a direct sequel and tonally very different but just as good. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart