Wall to Wall 2025 Netflix Honest Review

Wall to Wall Review: The South Korean thriller Wall to Wall, tests the limits of the human psyche and mental endurance. So should this be at the top of your watchlist?

The captivating story line

Woo-sung is a man who finally saves up enough to buy an apartment, only to have it turn into a nightmare filled with financial ruin and mysterious noises from neighboring floors.

So the premise for this is there’s a housing boom where properties are hard to get, leading to extraordinary rises in prices. And then, just like in real life, prices rise, then fall, and when they fall, it’s tough to unload the property and still come out solvent.

Woo-sung gets in over his head with the lease and this apartment building that cost him a ridiculous sum of money. And then as the market begins to crash, he falls behind in payments. While he’s trying to either sell his place or figure out a way to make enough to keep it, strange noises emanate throughout the apartment, creating distress and annoyance not only for Woo-sung, but for his neighbors as well, leading everyone to blame him for the cause of the racket.

Slow-paced and boring? an honest Wall to Wall review

Now, the movie’s just about two hours long and it felt like the story was beginning to feel, just maybe, that it could be going towards the end, but it was only halfway through the film. The first hour of this is slow, and then it’s also repetitive. The repetition is necessary to illustrate the isolation and the desperation Woo-sung begins to experience, which is then combined with his dire situations.

Now the slowness comes from just simply watching the character move depressingly and kind of aimlessly through life. There are scenes of him at work that don’t really add much in the way of development, only continuing to paint the picture of his seemingly doomed life.

But at about that halfway point, the storytelling gets a much-needed boost in urgency and anxiety. The noises that are plaguing Woo-sung and his neighbors reach a boiling point, and then the world begins to unravel. We go from an unsettling drama to a full-blown, explosive thriller, and the story keeps increasing that pressure through to the end of the movie.

Confusing plot-armours

The interactions Woo-sung has with his neighbors are messy, sometimes unhinged, and full of doubt. And the audience can’t tell if he was going nuts or if the rest of the building was gaslighting him. Maybe just in order to get him to move out. These sequences are uncomfortable thanks to the sketchy and jumpy mannerisms of Woo-sung. He comes across as someone who is just quickly losing their grasp on reality, or at least their mind; driving them ever closer to something heinous or harmful. It feels like the plot is working to expose corruption and shoddy work, all while wrapping it up in an exciting thriller.

Lack of character Depth

Some of the characters could have been more fleshed out to give a better understanding of their roles within these types of processes. But we can get the gist of their motives just through some of the dialog. There is a key element that is revealed towards the climax of the movie. It feels kind of out of place. From an excitement and suspense standpoint, it’s an excellent addition to the arc. But from a believability perspective, it makes the outcome much less plausible. I mean, this didn’t break me out of the movie. It was just something that struck me later as I was processing the story as a whole.

Predictable twists

We can all pretty much tell what’s going to happen in certain instances, but that didn’t take away from the intensity of the buildup. There’s a scene within a police station that has a darkly humorous exchange, and it is also wildly stressful. Again, the outcome is predictable, but it doesn’t remove the anxiety and pressure that’s crafted, thanks to both the performances and the incessant pounding noise that we’re subjected to along with the residents.

The urgent dread the story establishes, combined with foreboding hopelessness, all work together to craft an atmosphere that puts our nerves on edge, while illustrating the lengths one will go to reverse misery. And while some aspects of character motivations aren’t plausible, and more background would have made the commentary stronger, the filming style helps to create and maintain uncertainty and stress, allowing the thrills to seep in and grip us through to the conclusion.

There is no sex or nudity. There’s a bunch of profanity and a lot of violence.