His 2023 feature film debut Unlockauthor director Kim Tae-Joon uses the cat-and-mouse serial killer premise to expose our modern reliance on smartphones. In the new Netflix psychological thriller Wall to wall (called 84 square metersin South Korea), the Korean filmmaker has designated his directorial attractions as modern apartment living. Cut with the same cultural cloth Squid Game and Parasitethey are all North Korean stories, their relevance is more extensive, Wall to wall It is a modern allegory about the dangers of class ambitions.
When Noh Woo-Sung (Yours'Kang ha-neul) uses the last asset of his life to buy apartments in Seoul's infamous competitive housing market, which he believes is the next step on his linear path to success, stable life. Three years later, he was in pain. Woo-Sung's mental and physical exhaustion was barely able to keep the mortgage, which worsened the thump he heard on the apartment wall.
When Woo-Sung's neighbors were convinced that Woo-Sung made noise, he vowed to prove his innocence by finding the real culprit, resulting in a twisted discovery. Let's break down the deeper meaning behind it Wall to wallplot and ending.
South Korea, “Apartment Republic”
The noisy neighbor is not a particular Korean issue, but in a 75% co-residential building, this is an important issue, the building's concrete mix walls are wider than 30 cm, which is not eliminating the sound every day. According to a 2024 daily article in Joonggang, South Korea, annual intermediary noise complaints filed with the state-run neighbourhood relations center increased from 8,795 in 2012 to 36,435 in 2023. Sound qualification test.
South Korea began building apartments in the 1960s after the destruction of the Korean War and as part of a rapid industrialization process in the coming decades.
“Apartments are not an attractive alternative to people in many countries. But in South Korea, the then government promoted the middle-class housing model, a symbol of modernization,” Jung Heon-Mok, an anthropology professor at the Korean Studies Institute, told the Korea Herald. Modernization has promoted the popularity of apartments. ”
Today, one in five Korean households own 91% of the country’s private land, and the lowest 50% own less than 1% of households. Most people who own property are considered “poor houses,” a term that is not suitable for other types of wealth construction or discretionary expenditures for most people whose income is spent on housing costs. Woo-Sung's manager uses descriptors to describe our protagonists early on Wall to wall. This is a major problem in South Korea, where real estate accounts for 79% of the average home ownership assets in 2024.
Who is behind the noise in the compartment Wall to wall?
Who is making noise between lines Wall to wall? The culprit behind the turmoil in the Woo-Sung apartment building is Yeong Jin-ho (Seo Hyeon-woo), an unfortunate freelancer journalist living in an apartment in 1501. Jin-ho is seeking revenge on Jeon Eun-Hwa (Yeom Hye-Ran), a former official who used her motivation to kill a tough apartment, a huge apartment, the company's job is a family, a family at work, which is a family's job. Now she lives with her husband in a luxurious penthouse in the building.
When Woo-Sung first came to Eun-Hwa for the issue of neighbor noise, she convinced him to put it down by bribing him with money and invoking false sense of class unity. Eun-HWA is motivated to keep noise complaints quiet as she secretly bought apartments in most complexes. She has internal information that the GTX commuter rail will enter nearby, which will increase the value of the property.
Meanwhile, Jin-ho moved into the building with the sole purpose of landing Eun-Hwa. His plan? A summary of a video revealing her corruption is revealed. Jin-ho drills the entire complex so that he can observe, shoot and control each unit. He began interviewing residents of the complex and portrayed Woo-Sung, the owner and resident of the apartment in 1401, as the central rival in his story, seeing him as “a microcosm of the pain that young people suffer this year.” Jin-ho doesn't care whether the details of the exposé are real, as long as the end result is the fall of Eun-Hwa.
First, Jin-Ho frames seed “interfloor revenge speakers” in the apartment to attract apartment noise. He paid to the tenant who lived in 1301, the apartment below Woo-Sung, pretending that their neighbors attacked them. Since Woo-Sung is held by police, he missed the window to take advantage of the “pump” crypto program that will pay off debts. Woo-Sung sold his apartment to free up cash from the program, and now he has nothing.
Woo-Sung plans to die in suicide, but Jin-Ho stops him, claiming he wants to help him. “We were wasting a lot of time, and there were some other assholes at the time,” Jin-ho told Woo-Sung, revealing that Eun-Hwa was the buyer who used Woo-Sung’s desperate apartment sales.
Yeom Hye-Ran plays Jeon Eun-Hwa and Seo Hyun-woo plays young Jin-ho Wall to wall Young-UK Jeon-Netlix
How about it Wall to wall End?
Woo-Sung thinks he finally found a friend in Jin-Ho. But he would feel suspicious when he realized that the phone of the Revenge speaker planted in his apartment was related to Jin-Ho's Wi-Fi. He found Jin-Ho's walls covered with information about everyone living in the complex and saw all the videotapes he collected. While hiding in Jin-Ho's apartment, Woo-Sung also witnessed him killing his neighbors from his apartment in 1301. When Jin-Ho caught Woo-Sung, he planned to kill Woo-Sung too and pin the murder to him. But Woo-Sung convinced Jin-Ho to give him a more active role in the Revenge program.
The two went to the penthouse in Enha together, dragging the 1301-year-old body. Kim Ho desperately hopes to find a ledger to prove the corruption of the former prosecutor, and Woo-Sung is just desperate. In the bloody conflict that broke out, Kim Ho killed Eunha’s husband, but took a kitchen knife in the process. Eun-Hwa tries to convince Woo-Sung to end Jin-Ho. “I'll take care of everything, so trust me,” she told Woo-Sung.
Jin-Ho seems dead until Woo-Sung can do this. Now that she doesn't need him anymore, Eun-hwa opens Woo-Sung and tells him how she really feels: “Your sh-t soft snippet. That's why people live in a good neighborhood. This place is full of scum.” She points out angrily, the dirty ledger hidden in a bunch of magazines nearby and holds up the golf club to kill Woo-Sung.
But Jinhou rises from his seemingly forged death. He suffocated Eun-Hwa to death while on Woo-Sung's watch and chose not to try to help Eun-Hwa.
When Kimhok bleed, he told Woo-Sung to get out the ledger. Even if he dies, he wants Eun-Hwa to take charge. “Don't tell me what to do, your mother,” he put the ledger and documents proving that he signed the apartment to the oven, and then carried the gasoline to the King-Ho had cut into the line.
When the penthouse explodes, Woo-Sung will carry out the apartment building and bring all the evidence from Eun-Hwa and Jin-Ho. Woo-Sung lands on the ground, imagining the entire building collapses in fiery destruction.
What is the ending Wall to wall What does it mean?
When Woo-Sung woke up, he was in the hospital with his mother beside him. She took him home and back to the countryside, the aging village of Namhae. The rural community provides Woo-Sung with a resting place and provides space to do so. His mother may not have much, but she has a home that is not an apartment building in particular. The red pepper was drying in the sun on her roof, and it was quiet.
Despite this, Woo-Sung chose to return to Seoul. As he stood in his suit in an empty apartment, he heard the sound of the interlaced lines and began to smile at himself. Jin-Ho and Eun-Hwa may have died, but the noise in the apartment continues because it is the noise of modern humans, squeezed together. The audience left a question: would you choose to live in an apartment, a symbol of middle class, modern life, to have the opportunity to build wealth, even if it drives you crazy? Or would you choose to return to a simpler, more traditional country life without hope of class ascension?
Before Eun-Hwa's death, she told Woo-Sung: “Noise between floors is a human problem. Why blame the building?” The film asks if the conflicts arise in modern life in “developed” countries like South Korea are inherent to humans, or the result of institutions like capitalism. Wall to wall Let the audience answer this question on their own, although Woo-Sung returns to his apartment to show that Kim believes that there is an inherent human ambition or greed that keeps us pushing more.