Finished Gyeongseong Creature? Watch This 100% Rated 2023 Movie Next

Summary

• This phenomenal movie is a critical darling from South Korea.
• It has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was the country's entry for the 96th annual Academy Awards.
• The plot follows the residents of an apartment whose building is the only one standing after an earthquake.

Okay, so you've finished Season 1 of historical-scifi-horror-drama Gyeongseong Creature. Maybe you've recently heard that there is going to be a second season – hooray! But what are you going to watch while you wait to see more of Park Seo-joon's brave and beautiful face? Well, we've got good news for you.

This past year Park Seo-joon starred in Concrete Utopia, Korea's unanimously elected entry into the 2024 Academy Awards and a movie that carries the rare distinction of a 100% critic's rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

What's It About?

After an earthquake decimates Seoul, the Hwang Gung apartment building is the only structure left standing for miles. There are no hospitals, grocery stores, or shelters around, and residents scramble to prevent the building from becoming overrun by the needy and homeless people outside.

Kim Young-tak (Lee Byung-hun) becomes the cult-like leader of Hwang Gung, a position that he at first holds with compassionate aplomb before a slow slide into autocracy begins.

Park Seo-joon plays Min-sung, Young-tak's right hand man. Min-Sung is a civil servant mostly trying to keep his head down, and serves as the audience's surrogate as we watch the rise of Young-tak and the struggles of the apartments' residents as they try to balance survival with compassion.

A Study of Human Nature

Food and supplies quickly run low in any disaster, and the residents of Hwang Gung are determined to survive the winter and guard their home against squatters – or 'cockroaches', as they come to be called.

Concrete Utopia is an allegory for the class tensions on the rise in Korea and elsewhere across the world, as the gap between 'Haves' and 'Have-Nots' continues to widen. Ming-sung's wife Myung-hwa is one of the first to suspect that all is not as it seems with Young-tak, and she begins to look into the leader and his true motives even as things get more and more desperate inside and outside of the apartment building.

The setup has echoes of Lord of The Flies, but this series manages to avoid being too predictable in its darkly satirical look at what we're willing to do to survive.

Universal Praise

Here are some of the things critics have been saying about Concrete Utopia:

'With brilliant performances and a balanced, harrowing story to propel it, Concrete Utopia isn't just one of the best films of the year: it may be the best disaster thriller in years.' – Inverse

'Lee's viscerally monstrous performance grounds a high-stakes drama.' – Los Angeles Times

'With great production design, compelling performances all around, and a sufficiently layered script, it asks more soaring questions about humanity's capacity for violence when pushed to the brink just as it builds its broken world from the ground up.' – Collider

'Shot through with shards of dark humor, 'Concrete Utopia' observes how quickly we dehumanize the needy when they threaten our survival — and asks if we can be blamed for doing so.' – The New York Times

Where Can I Watch It?

Surprisingly, Concrete Utopia wasn't scooped up by any of the major streamers – not even by Netflix, which has dedicated billions of dollars to building up its library of South Korean dramas.

Instead, Rakuten Viki, a streaming site that focuses on Asian content, has nabbed exclusive rights to the movie. Concrete Utopia became available in February 2024.