In his 2023 feature film debut Unlocked, writer-director Kim Tae-joon used a cat-and-mouse serial killer premise to lay bare our modern dependence on smartphones. In the new Netflix psychological thriller Wall to Wall (known as 84 Square Meters, in Korean), the Korean filmmaker sets his directorial sights on modern apartment living. Cut from the same cultural cloth as Squid Game and Parasite, which are both distinctly Korean stories and also so much broader in their relatability, Wall to Wall is a modern parable about the perils of class ambition.
When Noh Woo-sung (Tastefully Yours’ Kang Ha-neul) leverages every last asset in his life to buy an apartment in Seoul’s notoriously competitive housing market, he believes it is the next step in his linear path to a successful, stable life. Three long years later, he’s miserable. Working two jobs to barely stay ahead of his mortgage, Woo-sung’s mental and physical exhaustion is exacerbated by the thumping he hears through his apartment walls.
When Woo-sung’s neighbors become convinced it is Woo-sung who is making the noises, he vows to prove his innocence by finding the true culprit, leading to a twist-filled discovery. Let’s break down the deeper meaning behind Wall to Wall’s plot and ending.
Korea, “republic of apartments”
Noisy neighbors is not a specifically Korean problem, but it is a significant issue in a country where 75% live in co-residential buildings with concrete-mixed walls less than 30 cm wide, that don’t fully muffle everyday sounds. According to a 2024 article from Korea JoongAng Daily, the number of yearly inter-apartment noise complaints filed to the state-run Center for Neighbors’ Relations rose from 8,795 in 2012 to 36,435 in 2023. The problem of inter-apartment noise in Seoul apartment buildings has become enough of an issue that the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport announced that it would authorize construction completions only when new residential buildings pass the sound qualification test.
Korea started building apartments in the 1960s, following the devastation of the Korean War and as part of the rapid industrialization process that would take place over the next few decades.
“An apartment was not an attractive alternative to people in many countries. But in Korea the then-government pushed ahead with the housing models for the middle class as a symbol of modernization,” Jung Heon-mok, anthropology professor at The Academy of Korean Studies, told The Korea Herald, in 2021. “For example, it was apartments where stand-up kitchens and flush toilets were introduced to Koreans for the first time. The government’s drive and social desire for modernization fueled the popularity of the apartments.”
Today, a fifth of Korean households own 91% of the country’s private land, with the bottom 50% of households owning less than 1%. Most of the people who own property are considered “house poor,” the term for people whose income mostly goes to housing costs, disallowing for other kinds of wealth-building or discretionary spending. Woo-sung’s manager uses the descriptor to describe our protagonist early on in Wall to Wall. It’s a major issue in Korea, where real estate accounted for 79% of the average assets of households owning their homes in 2024.
Who is behind the inter-apartment noises in Wall to Wall?
Who is making the inter-apartment noise in Wall to Wall? The immediate culprit behind the unrest at Woo-sung’s apartment building is Yeong Jin-ho (Seo Hyeon-woo), a disgruntled freelance journalist living in Apartment 1501. Jin-ho is seeking revenge against Jeon Eun-hwa (Yeom Hye-ran), a former prosecutor who used her power to kill a story Jin-ho was working on about the poor construction of the apartment complex. Now, she lives in the building’s luxurious penthouse apartment with her husband.
When Woo-sung first comes to Eun-hwa with the problem of the inter-apartment noise, she convinces him to drop it by bribing him with an envelope of money and invoking a false sense of class solidarity. Eun-hwa is motivated to keep the noise complaints quiet because she has secretly been buying up most of the complex’s apartments. She has inside information that the GTX commuter rail will be coming to the neighborhood, which would drive up property values.
Meanwhile, Jin-ho has moved into the building with the sole purpose of bringing Eun-hwa down. His plan? To put together a video exposé that reveals her corruption. Jin-ho rigs the entire complex so that he can observe, film, and control every unit. He begins to interview the complex’s residents, and casts Woo-sung, the owner and resident of Apartment 1401, as the central antagonist in his story, seeing him as “the epitome of pain suffered by today’s young people.” Jin-ho doesn’t care if the details of the exposé are true, as long as the end result is Eun-hwa’s downfall.
First, Jin-ho frames Woo-sung for the apartment noises by planting an “inter-floor revenge speaker” in his apartment. He pays the renters living in 1301, the apartment below Woo-sung, to pretend their neighbor has assaulted them. Because Woo-sung is held by the police, he misses the window to cash in on a “pump-and-dump” crypto scheme that would pay off his debt. Woo-sung sold his apartment in order to free up cash for the scheme, and now he has nothing.
Woo-sung plans to die by suicide, but Jin-ho stops him, claiming he wants to help him. “We wasted a sh-t ton of time fighting each other when it was some other jerks,” Jin-ho tells Woo-sung, revealing that Eun-hwa was the buyer who took advantage of Woo-sung’s desperate apartment sale.
How does Wall to Wall end?
Woo-sung thinks he has finally found a friend in Jin-ho. However, when he realizes that the mobile phone running the revenge speaker planted in his apartment is connected to Jin-ho’s Wi-Fi, he gets suspicious. He finds Jin-ho’s wall plastered with information about everyone living in the complex, and sees all of the video footage he has collected. While hiding in Jin-ho’s apartment, Woo-sung also witnesses him kill his neighbor from Apartment 1301. When Jin-ho catches Woo-sung, he plans to kill Woo-sung as well, and pin the murder on him. However, Woo-sung convinces Jin-ho to let him take a more active role in the revenge scheme.
Together, the two men go up to Eun-hwa’s penthouse apartment, dragging Apartment 1301’s dead body with them. Jin-ho is desperate to find the ledger proving the former prosecutor’s corruption, and Woo-sung is just desperate. In the bloody conflict that breaks out, Jin-ho kills Eun-hwa’s husband but gets a kitchen knife to the gut in the process. Eun-hwa tries to convince Woo-sung to finish off Jin-ho. “I’ll take care of everything, so trust me,” she tells Woo-sung.
Before Woo-sung can do it, Jin-ho seemingly dies. Now that she no longer needs him, Eun-hwa turns on Woo-sung and tells him how she really feels: “You indecisive piece of sh-t. This is why people live in nice neighborhoods. This place is swarming with scum.” She cockily points out the dirty ledger hidden within a nearby stack of magazines, and raises a golf club to kill Woo-sung.
But Jin-ho rises up from his apparently faked death. He chokes Eun-hwa to death while Woo-sung watches, choosing not to try to help Eun-hwa.
As Jin-ho bleeds out, he tells Woo-sung to take the ledger. Even if he dies, he wants Eun-hwa to be held accountable. “Stop telling me what to do, you motherf-ckers,” Woo-sung tells Jin-ho. He puts the ledger and the papers that prove he signed away his apartment into the oven, then turns up the gas to the line Jin-ho already cut.
Woo-sung is limping out of the apartment complex when the penthouse explodes, taking all of the evidence of both Eun-hwa and Jin-ho’s crimes with it. Woo-sung falls to the ground, imagining the entire building crumbling in fiery destruction.
What does the ending of Wall to Wall mean?
When Woo-sung wakes up, he is in the hospital and his mother is by his side. She takes him home to the countryside, to the aging, seaside village of Namhae. The rural community offers Woo-sung a place to rest and the space to do so. His mother may not have much, but she has a home that is notably not an apartment complex. Red peppers dry in the sun on her rooftop, and it is quiet.
Still, Woo-sung chooses to return to Seoul. As he stands in a suit in his empty apartment, he hears inter-apartment noise, and begins to laugh to himself. Jin-ho and Eun-hwa may be dead, but the noise of the apartment goes on because it is the noise of modern humanity, squished together. The viewer is left with a question: Would you choose to live in the apartment, a symbol of middle class, modern life, for the chance to build wealth—even if it drives you insane? Or would you choose to return to the simpler, more traditional life of the countryside, where it is quiet, but there is no hope for class ascension?
Before Eun-hwa died, she told Woo-sung: “Noise between floors is a human problem. Why blame the building?” The movie is asking if the kind of conflict that arises from modern living in a “developed” country like South Korea is inherent to humanity, or if it is a result of a system like capitalism. Wall to Wall lets the viewer answer this question for herself, though Woo-sung’s return to his apartment suggests that Kim believes that there is an inherent human ambition or greed that keeps us pushing for more.
