Wall to Wall is essentially two movies in one. The first is a genuinely involving and claustrophobic thriller with proper themes and compelling mysteries. The second takes a hammer to those foundations quite literally, and is almost an hour of people being periodically battered to death. The thematic and dramatic considerations both end up spilling from the wounds, pooling on the floor as a congealing reminder of what happens when the only way out of a screenwriting corner is going through the nearest wall, for better or worse.
Since critics, contrary to popular belief, don’t like to rely on clichés, that’s probably the last time I’ll lean on construction metaphors for a cheap laugh. But you can’t really blame me, since Kim Tae-joon’s Netflix movie serves them on a plate. A narrative is, after all, not dissimilar from a building. It has to have sturdy foundations, escape routes for safety, and be full of people. The higher it reaches, the more perilous it feels, and the harder it is to navigate. It’s always liable to collapse with everyone still inside.
This is the story of what happened to Wall to Wall in microcosm. Tae-joon had a good idea and kept building atop it like a Jenga tower until it teetered and fell. The good idea finds Woo-seong (Kang Ha-neul, Squid Game, Tastefully Yours) doing everything he can to secure his dream home, only for the fantasy to become nightmarish. This works on multiple levels. Woo-seong crippled himself with debt to facilitate the purchase, and now lives in a cloying prison to try and keep his head above water. The predatory nature of lenders, the endless debate between renting and buying, the implications of both on a collapsing housing market, and the terribly relatable fear of a hard-earned dream collapsing through our fingers as though it was never real to begin with, all feel like relevant, coherent themes.
And then there are the noises. Woo-seong is plagued by them; constant banging on the walls, floors, and ceilings, and a constant stream of sticky notes blaming him for them. The idea of a home as a sanctuary is effectively contorted, with Woo-seong steadily being stripped of his comfort, his security, and his peace, as he becomes a target of the residents whose representative, Eun-hwa (Yeom Hye-ran, When Life Gives You Tangerines), assures Woo-seong that it’s just a matter of waiting until the undesirables are moved on. What constitutes an “undesirable” in this context isn’t novel or surprising, but feels of a piece with what Wall to Wall is trying to say.
All of this stuff works well, building with consistency and increasing paranoia to a midpoint that in many ways looks and feels like an ending. But then it keeps going, with no real release of the pent-up tension, and no particularly satisfying narrative justification for any of it. Each new idea – I’m loathe to call them “twists” – feels designed to extend the runtime more than justify its own inclusion, and the scattershot feeling of the movie’s back-half eventually becomes overwhelming. There are only so many people you can see being violently thwacked to death with a hammer until the shock of that image is considerably lessened. Every attempt the movie makes to one-up itself has the opposite effect.
It’s a shame, as there’s some real thematic texture here, and you can tell a movie that stripped a half-hour off the runtime and committed solely to its ideas instead of meeting a checklist of obligatory genre tropes would have probably been really good. The actors are all up for it and deserving of meatier characters, and that lean, claustrophobic thriller of the early going deserved a better, more coherent payoff. But such is life. Sometimes you work hard for what you think you want and realise it was never all it was made out to be in the first place. On the level of that idea, at least, Wall to Wall performs precisely as advertised.
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