Latest entry in Korea's post-apocalyptic franchise goes younger and darker, but the allegory doesn't hold
"It's its own film," Hong Ki-won said.
He'd been fielding variations of the same question since sitting down at Lotte Cinema World Tower on Monday afternoon — what does this have to do with the other works within the franchise, especially 2023's "Concrete Utopia"? The director of "Concrete Market" seemed ready for it. "We share the post-earthquake setting. That's it. New characters, new space, new story."
The franchise in question did leave a mark. "Concrete Utopia" dropped viewers into the rubble of Seoul after a cataclysmic earthquake, following residents of the only apartment complex left standing as they voted to expel outsiders, rationed supplies, and slid into a totalitarian hellscape.
Lee Byung-hun played the self-appointed delegate, all neighborly warmth before spiraling into madness. It struck a chord as allegory: The horrors of the ravaged world pointed at Korea's cutthroat housing market and the primal insecurity it breeds.
The fictional universe proved resonant enough to spawn a Netflix sequel the year after, "Badland Hunters," a zombie-adjacent romp where Ma Dong-suk punched his way through mutant hordes.
"Concrete Market" sits somewhere between.
Originally conceived as a seven-episode series, it was trimmed into a feature film. The cast skews much younger — 21-year-old Lee Jae-in, fresh off her broad comedy "Hi-Five" earlier this year, and Hong Kyung, the 29-year-old who picked up best new actor at the Baeksang Art Awards for 2020's courtroom drama "Innocence," take the lead.
The director described his approach as a crime caper built around teenagers "who didn't know who they were before the disaster and still don't know after."
For all its youthful makeup, the premise is bleaker than either of its predecessors. Survivors huddle in a single apartment complex ruled by Sang-yong, a former salesperson who's clawed his way to absolute power through cunning and brute force.
Jung Man-sik, who's cornered the market on big screen thugs and villains, fittingly plays this tyrant. He described his role as "a friendly devil" whose smooth talk and paternal gestures mask something rotten beneath.
"I wanted someone you might have brushed past," he said. "At the office, or at school. That familiar face you don't think twice about."
True to its title, the film constructs a world reduced to the cold logic of exchange, and what you can barter determines whether you eat.
An entire floor operates as a de facto brothel, with women forced into sexual servitude by the exigencies of supply and demand — a difficult element Hong handles with care, by keeping the palette muted to show, as he put it, that "they're not entirely there by choice."
Into this world slips Hee-ro (Lee), an outsider with nothing to her name but grit. Don't let the baby face fool you — through subterfuge and uneasy alliances with Tae-jin (Hong Kyung), Sang-yong's loyal lackey with a flickering conscience, Hee-ro methodically games her way up the ranks.
Her goal is to avenge the death of a longtime friend she believes Sang-yong killed.
Jung, sitting beside the younger cast, spoke of the film in generational terms.
"Adults aren't teaching them anything," he said. "There's a line where Hee-ro says she wishes there was school — that first taste of society they never got."
Lee, the youngest in the room, described her character as someone who "pretends to be an adult, strategizes like one, but still has fear bubbling underneath."
"Concrete Utopia" worked, in part, because its apocalypse pointed somewhere beyond spectacle — toward the anxiety around homeownership that runs deep in Korean society.
"Concrete Market" aims to tackle something more universal in scale, more insidious in effect. What's at stake here is the capitalist system writ large, for which the marketplace is the chief metaphor.
Basic human dignity bends to the logic of supply and demand in this closed system, the prevalence of sex slavery being the most glaring symptom. A film that zeroes in on the distribution of limited resources dictated by the whims of power is, by definition, political, and Hong tries to imagine its ugliest excesses as well as a possible way out.
It's an ambitious project, a timely one, too, especially with rising inequality and populist resentment raging across the globe. But whether the execution lives up to the ambition is another question. Hee-ro's tactics — hoarding to fix prices, sabotaging common resources, politicking between competing factions, among others — seem too facile to pass as credible means of subversion against the system the film sets out to indict.
The plot twists arrive without much setup and distract from the thematic focus; its moralizing resolution, leaning on feminine solidarity, feels more formulaic than moving. The effect is an apocalypse watered down, its workings untethered from its allegorical reach — even more so than "Concrete Utopia," a film that wasn't exactly airtight on that front either.
Asked what audiences should take from the film, Lee opened up.
"When you're young and suddenly thrown into adulthood, that can feel like a disaster in its own right," she said. "Everyone deals with it differently. Some people lean on others. Some pretend they've already figured it out. I think younger viewers will see themselves in that."
"Also, it's just a great film to stan. I was watching and thinking, this would be so fun to obsess over."
"Concrete Market" opens in local theaters Wednesday.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com
