Review of Wall to Wall / 84제곱미터, directed by Kim Tae-joon

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

About a year ago (at the time of typing this) I quit my job as a professional film critic to explore what was out there in the world when it came to publishing about the movies and books I wanted to see, not just what was popular in the moment. Digital media and working within it can be fun and all, but it can be grinding when you’re just chasing after all the latest trends and clicks for SEO.

I started this blog four years ago, during the pandemic, but never really took it seriously beyond the occasional post here and there about what I was up to. In 2023 I began to realize the impact this blog was having on me, and other people were reaching out about reading it, so I expanded. Once I quit my job, I decided to focus on the blog more while job hunting, as I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the screen.

Anyways, I was watching a lot of movies during this time of being unemployed, as sometimes I would put them on as I was applying to jobs on the couch, and others while I was trying to brain rot after applying to said jobs. Job searching truly is a full-time job, and when I didn’t watch movies while doing it, I found myself sitting back and wanting to turn my mind off in the evenings.

Netflix in the past few years has been putting an impressive amount of Korean content, and I’m here for it. I specialized in East Asian cinema when I was working as a critic, and did academic work in it for both graduate and undergraduate studies, so I would say I’m very familiar with Korean national cinema as a whole. It helps that I’ve lived there fora bit too.

When Wall to Wall came out I was interested specifically because Kang Ha-neul was in it. I think he’s such a good actor, and I was curious to see how he tackled this role after I read the synopsis of the movie. I watched it the day it came out, although this blog post is going to come out much later than that because of my scheduling system.

Let’s get into the review! I can see this introduction is getting quite long.

After hitting it big in crypto and buying an apartment, a man starts hearing things in the walls.

Our main character in this movie is Noh Woo-sung, and at the beginning of the movie, he’s a bit of an average salaryman in Seoul. It’s 2021, he has a fiancee, and he’s ready to buy an apartment for the equivalent of a million USD. They move in and everything seems great for them, but when the apartment’s value crashes to below a million dollars, it leads to some tension between the fiancee and him.

They end up calling it off and Woo-sung finds himself barely afloat will all of the loans he took to purchase this apartment. He not only works at the office during the day, but he decides to become a delivery driver at night simply to make the bills and find a way to get himself out of the hole he’s dug for himself.

Things get dramatically worse when one night he starts hearing an alarm around 4:30 AM int he morning. The noise gradually begins to increase around him, and one day he even spots his neighbor leaving a complaint on his door about the noise. She thinks it’s him and when he confronts her to deny it, she comes into his apartment and gives him a weird warning about it.

Woo-sung then investigates on his own to figure out what’s happening. He goes to the other neighbors on different floors and to Eun-hwa, the owner of the penthouse and the resident representative in the building, tells him that it might actually be the neighbor who complained about him.

As this happens, a buddy tells Woo-sung about an upcoming crypto, but they have to buy and sell it at a certain time. Woo-sung sells his apartment to buy the crypto in large amounts, and it pays off when the value of it skyrockets to a value he could have never expected. It’s then the neighbors come to confront him about the noise.

He refuses their demands to go into his apartment, as they insist it’s him, but when someone forces their way in, they find a subwoofer making noise hidden inside of his apartment. He denies that fact that he put it there, shocked at its existence, but then he gets into a fight and then ends up getting arrested for not only the noise, but for assaulting the other guy who went into his apartment.

It’s while in custody he misses the golden window to sell the crypto, as the police officers tase him before he’s able to get ahold of the computer and press sell. He manages to lose everything because of this, and when he goes to his apartment again, he starts hearing the noises. Another neighbor, Jin-ho, finds Woo-sung as he goes to investigate and tells him he thinks he’s innocent.

He suspects Eun-hwa of being the culprit and they try to snoop in her apartment but fail. It’s after this incident that Woo-sung realizes that the subwoofer in his apartment is controlled by the Internet, and it’s coming from Jin-ho’s apartment. He steals Jin-ho’s keys at the sauna and finds an entire system in his apartment to make noise, as he’s a journalist trying to take down the building for construction fraud.

With Jin-ho, he goes up to Eun-hwa’s apartment to confront her. A violent fight breaks out, and Woo-sung ends up burning the entire apartment down with the evidence inside. He wakes up in the hospital, goes home to his mother, then comes back to his apartment. The movie ends with him there, in the middle of the night, hearing the noise.

Overall Thoughts

For me, I thought this movie was interesting because right after I watched it, I went to my Korean lesson and my teacher was telling me about crypto in Korea and how young men, like Woo-sung, were falling victim to its lure. That added a lot of extra context to this movie, as well as the previous knowledge about how unaffordable Seoul properties are for the average Korean worker.

If you’re coming into this movie blind about all of this context, then you might not be able to understand the layers of depth it has, especially when it comes to Korean society. The construction fraud was also interesting to me because of the “quick, quick, quick” attitudes in Korea when it comes to construction, as a lot of buildings were built so quickly for people to live in them, or shops to go inside, and safety wasn’t a consideration.

So all in all: this is an interesting and compelling movie if you’re looking to see how current and contemporary Korean society is reflecting back in its ideals and themes. I liked it more with that approach. If not, I might’ve found this to be quite a boring movie that had good tension, but not worth revisiting.

I say go watch it if you’re interested and haven’t already. Movies are meant to be seen, not read about!

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