Review of the thriller “Collapse” by Korean director Kim Ji-woon

The comedy thriller “Collapse” by Korean director Kim Ji-woong about Seoul residents tormented by the housing problem has been released. Yulia Shagelman reports.

Collapse is Kim Ji-woong’s sixth directorial effort, and his short filmography seems to cover almost the entire spectrum of genres typical of South Korean cinema. There is an action movie, a crime drama, a crime comedy, and a historical drama dedicated to the 1980 uprising in Gwangju. There is also a disaster film – “The Tower” (2012) about a fire in a 120-story skyscraper in the center of Seoul just before Christmas.

His new film is an amazing hybrid: on the one hand, it is again a developer’s nightmare, albeit on a more modest scale, and on the other, oddly enough, it is a comedy, and not even a black one, but quite an everyday one.

It’s as if from Yuri Bykov’s film “The Fool” (2014), which told the story of an honest plumber who tried to get corrupt officials to resettle an emergency dormitory, they removed all the Russian provincial chthony and denunciations of the rotten system, replacing them with gags with people stuck in automatic doors .

Mr. Park (Kim Sung-kyun) with his wife (Kwon So-hyun) and little son (Kim Gun-woo) moves into an apartment in a brand new five-story building that he has been saving for for eleven years. He is trying his best to make this life achievement seem more significant than it is: the area that used to be an industrial zone and a car dump is, in fact, beautiful and environmentally friendly, and the apartment is wonderful, with three whole rooms. The joy of housewarming is poisoned by thoughts of a huge mortgage, but first of all, meeting an unpleasant neighbor (Cha Seung Won), which begins with the fact that he blocked the entrance with his car and did not even apologize. It turns out that this boor works in a local gym, and in a photo studio, and even in the “sober driver” service, so Puck constantly bumps into him, and each of their meetings ends in a clash.

In addition, something is clearly wrong with the dream house. The floors in the apartment are askew, the window frames are stuck, and ominous cracks are spreading along the sidewalk around the entrance. Park tries to persuade neighbors to submit a collective request for a preventive inspection of the condition of the house, but they refuse because they are afraid that this will reduce the investment value of their home. He is especially embarrassed in front of his young subordinates, whom he invites to a housewarming party: they are not at all impressed by the apartment, from the balcony of which much more prestigious (and inaccessible to anyone present) areas are visible.

Issues of social status and acute wealth stratification are very relevant for both Korean society and national cinema: among the striking examples here we can recall, say, the four-time Oscar-winning “Parasite” by Bong Chun-ho (2019).

“Collapse” at first also seems to be a satirical exercise on these topics, although the humor here is still rather primitive. However, the intonation of the picture changes when the morning after the housewarming party, Park’s house suddenly falls into the ground due to rain that washed away the soil, and he, his young colleagues Kim (Lee Gwang Soo) and Yun Joo (Kim Tae Joon) and that same nasty neighbor find themselves walled up at a depth of 500 meters.

However, it’s not long before Kim Ji-woon and screenwriter Jung Cheol-heon stop joking. For some time the heroes run amusingly around the house, which continues to collapse (the collapse itself was filmed quite effectively, although the computer graphics are very striking), scream funny and enter into minor confrontations. But soon the picture finally mutates into an honest (and towards the end – openly sentimental) disaster film with all its signs: worried relatives are crying upstairs, rescuers are making desperate attempts to pull out the survivors, the latter themselves, forgetting about differences, show miracles of heroism and mutual assistance. There are also victims, shown with all seriousness, accompanied by tear-squeezing music: if Pak and company are firmly protected by “script armor,” then some neighbors are not so lucky. Because of such sudden changes, the entire structure of the picture seems as unstable as an ill-fated collapsed house.