Wall to Wall Review: An Average Joe in an Average (Yet Socially Critical) Thriller

Some films prove that real life can be scarier than any fiction. Endless debt, rising interest rates, undue blame, terrible bosses, desperate decisions, noisy neighbours. If you put all of these elements together, you can easily draw a nightmarish scenario that might shake even the most stoic of us. That’s where we might find Netflix’s Wall to Wall, a disturbing tale that can be more recognisable than we would like to admit.

Released on July 18th, Wall to Wall (84제곱미터, lit. 84m²) was written and directed by Kim Tae-joon, who returns to Netflix to follow up his 2023 debut feature, Unlocked. Charged with social criticism but featuring quite a few cracks in its narrative, Wall to Wall is a psychological thriller with a good dose of mystery that secured third place among Netflix’s Top 10 Non-English Movies in its premiere week.

The film begins in 2021, when office worker Noh Woo-sung (Kang Ha-neul) invested his life savings and took out massive loans to make his homeowner dream come true. Three years later, Woo-sung is juggling two jobs, trying to make ends meet and pay back his ever higher interest mortgage. Exhausted and at his wits’ end, he can’t even rest properly at home as he’s kept awake by loud noises from neighbouring floors. Things get even worse when his neighbours gang up against him, believing he’s the one responsible for the chaos in their building.

This review is spoiler-free! But if you don’t have time to read it all, why don’t you pin our summary? It’s at the bottom!

Inter-floor Noise and Housing Crisis: Layers of Social Critique Behind the Thriller Facade

The real strength of Kim’s script is its powerful and sharp social criticism, which makes for the film’s backbone. Beyond the thriller, the mystery, and the violence, Wall to Wall is a story that reflects the nightmares and demons of an entire generation in Korea.

According to The Chosun Daily, South Korea is a country of “house-poor” individuals (a term that labels our protagonist in the film too), that is, people who “own real estate but lack liquidity.” In an article from February 2025, journalists Kang Woo-ryang and Lee Jung-soo mention:

Seo Jin-Hyeong, a professor at Kwangwoon University, noted that “Despite sky-high housing prices in the capital region, people continue to endure the burden due to the widening gap in education, healthcare, transportation, and job opportunities between large and small cities.”

This effort to “endure the burden” is what Wall to Wall illustrates best: Woo-sung steals food from his office to eat and doesn’t even turn his lights on at home in order to reduce his electricity bill, which he clearly can’t afford.

The first three minutes of Wall to Wall introduce us to our protagonist as a person who squeezed every single penny he’s ever saved to buy an 84m² apartment, which refers to “the most popular apartment size in Korea.” He’s seen happily celebrating with his fiancée the almost immediate appreciation of the property, basking in light, happiness, and a brand-new home filled with the hope of a blissful future.

Woo-sung represents a generation that was told to move to the big city, study, and secure a position in a decent company. Then, meet someone, marry, and buy a home. From there, it’s plain sailing. Just keep working and taking care of your family until the day you retire, right?

If you scoffed at that description, you won’t scoff at where this script takes you next.

These first three minutes are the only colourful and bright minutes of the entire film. Opening title, cut to three years later. The warm, bright apartment has been replaced with a pigsty: it’s now dirty, dark, and cold. Woo-sung lacks the vitality he exuded a mere minute ago. Exposition continues at the office, where we find out that his colleague — who chose to bet on crypto instead of real estate — is now rich. Through a conversation with his friend, we find out that Woo-sung has called off his wedding, the interest on his mortgage is unbearable, and that he laughs — a wavering laughter — at his friend’s belief that crypto can bring on boundless riches.

Within fifteen minutes, we’ve seen (and maybe even recognised ourselves in) Woo-sung’s reality of multiple jobs, drowning debt, and hopeless future prospects. You might also have felt his pain when it comes to the noises that wake him up in the middle of the night and haunt his murky nights. Are these noises a cinematic metaphor for his chaotic inner world? Not really. The “burden” of owning an apartment in Korea also includes this extra “perk”: inter-floor noise is a serious social problem, too.

In April 2025, The Korea Herald announced that:

According to data released by the Korea National Police Agency, up to 137,912 reports were made to the police from 2021 to 2024 regarding interfloor noise, with an average of 160 reports being made daily. The report added that more than 50 percent of such reports ended with violence-related cases, underscoring the high potential for noise disputes to escalate.

With this background, we understand that Kim established a fictional thriller in a very common environment. Behind the glitz and glamour of K-pop and the beautiful cinematography of K-dramas, this is the reality that surrounds millions of Koreans. Woo-sung is your average Joe, living in your average place, working like a dog in your average job (plus part-time job).

Exposition comes to an end when Woo-sung is introduced to his tough upstairs neighbour Yeong Jin-ho (Seo Hyeon-woo) and wealthy resident representative Jeon Eun-hwa (Yeom Hye-ran) in his quest to find the source of the noise that is driving him and his neighbours insane. From here, the film takes place almost entirely inside the building where Woo-sung lives, heightening a sense of dread and claustrophobia.

Through dark cinematography, almost psychedelic sequences, fast cutting, and effective sound effects, Wall to Wall brings us to Woo-sung’s inescapable universe with keen precision. The film makes you feel physically uncomfortable, transporting us to a cacophonous apartment building that seems to live on a loop.

As the plot unfolds, Woo-sung’s despair to escape a life that is killing him leads to irrational and foolish actions, locking him in a downward spiral that leads to a cynical ending. Through his journey, we see how capitalism — with all its endless need for profit, possession, and status — feeds a vicious cycle of greed, corruption, and egoism. Woo-sung is a fairly apathetic protagonist whose decisions come from circumstance, anguish, and peer pressure and not from interior motivation or a specific set of values. He’s often agitated and angry but doesn’t have the courage to stand up for himself or what he believes in (does he even believe in anything?).

Woo-sung is a victim, but he’s also a perpetrator. He suffers the consequences of a system he’s helping maintain. He complains and sees his efforts constantly go down the drain. He’s constantly manipulated and used by the people around him, made to dance according to the music they play and dragged up and down at their will. But he never really fights back. He’s an empty shell, who seems to become even more void of personality, values or objectives as time goes by.

Visually and thematically bleak, Wall to Wall offers neither answers nor hope. It simply amplifies the problems, hypocrisy, and chaos that surround us, exploring its most extreme, most violent facets to establish Woo-sung’s experience.

Cracks in the Wall: The Weaknesses in Wall to Wall

Even though the premise and the social criticism are excellent, Wall to Wall is far from perfect. The narrative execution is peppered with flaws that, when brought together, weaken the overall result. The pacing is inconsistent, characters and events get lost throughout the film, and Woo-sung can be easily seen as a protagonist who is too unresponsive.

Woo-sung, who is already apathetic, is established as a simplistic individual who doesn’t actively ignite the conflicts of the narrative. Maybe because he’s so average, the script felt that further characterisation wasn’t necessary — after all, we can all assign him a background of our choosing with the scraps of information we’re given. Lack of characterisation also happens with our villains, whose backstories are dumped on the audience in one big, almost indigestible go.

Wall to Wall lacks a proper and solid setup for both its characters and the twists and turns that lie at the heart of its mystery. With a bit more foreshadowing and better-paced rising action, the narrative could have been given a better development and consequently led to a more shocking climax and resolution.

Performances, however, are impeccable. Kang Ha-neul, whose filmography is heavily present on Netflix (Misaeng, When the Camellia Blooms, Squid Game, Tastefully Yours, and so on), is an absolute star. His Woo-sung shouts, cries, despairs, and goes completely insane — all the while maintaining a weirdly callous stance. Seo Hyeon-woo, who has just finished SBS’s Our Movie, appears alongside Kang with a completely different persona. He’s cruel, violent, and just as desperate as Woo-sung. The great Yeom Hye-ran, whose performance in When Life Gives You Tangerines has been widely celebrated and praised, also shows a different facet of her acting chops here. Jeon Eun-hwa is manipulative, greedy, and awfully unpleasant. The rest of Woo-sung’s neighbours are terribly creepy too, which adds to this overall uncomfortable, eerie tone that so clearly marks the film.

Should You Watch Wall to Wall?

Offering a forlorn, cynical, and scolding commentary on capitalism, the housing crisis, and the inter-floor noise matter in Korea, Wall to Wall will surely satisfy those who are looking for a raw perspective on modern society. However, the pacing and approach might not be everyone’s cup of tea, especially if you’re looking for more three-dimensional characters.

While the development of the narrative and its characters is definitely the film’s weak spot, the performances are a sight to behold, bringing intensity and dynamism to the feature. That’s one of the reasons why Kim’s sophomore movie succeeds in evoking such intense emotion. Wall to Wall is a film that makes you feel awfully disturbed — not because of gore but thanks to a well-established sinister tone. The cinematography and editing make you feel cornered, suffocated, and desolate — very much like its protagonist.

Wall to Wall might introduce you to a side of Korea that you aren’t very familiar with. Or it might make you feel seen in a capitalist society that dictates that we should always consume more, produce more, and earn more. Either way, fans of slow-paced psychological thrillers might find quite a bit of food for thought in the dreary, stifling universe of Wall to Wall.

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