KOREAN thriller Wall to Wall, written and directed by Kim Tae-joon, is a suspenseful watch that puts loneliness, ambition, and lack of human contact under the microscope in this powerful moral tale.
Woo-sung (Kang Ha-Neul) is a thirty-something office worker who has just managed to scrape onto the property ladder as the market crashes. Now the proud owner of an apartment in a newly built complex, he has fulfilled his lifelong dream and, with it, has gone from being poor to ‘house poor’. But this, according to his colleagues, is an achievement in itself.
Woo-sung isn’t so sure. Life in his new home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If anything, it proves to be a real slog and not the stuff of his wildest dreams. He’s up at 4.30am every day to get back up on the hamster wheel of life just to scrape by in a humdrum office job that he hates.
He barely earns enough money to pay his overheads and so goes as far as looting from the office canteen just to feed himself and keep a roof over his head. But he is determined to make it work. The market, he tells himself, will boom once more, and life will improve with it.
For now, he just has to hang on in there. However, he soon finds that this will prove a monumental task. After pouring his life savings into a new apartment, he now suffers sleepless nights from the disturbing noises in the walls that don’t let up when he is home. As he starts to question the neighbours about the noises, they soon see him as the most likely culprit and become increasingly hostile towards him.
As the prospect of losing both his home and his sanity become a reality, Woo-sung digs deep to uncover some unsettling secrets and a lunatic conspiracy, of the kind, only the Koreans could concoct.
Things get far-fetched fairly quickly but this eccentric film with twist upon twist is one I’d bet the homestead on.
(3/5)
