The Apartment as Semiosphere and the Untranslated Dread: Rewriting K-Dystopia through Concrete Utopia (2023)

This article analyzes Um Tae-hwa’s Concrete Utopia (2023) through Yuri Lotman’s concepts of spatial modelling, boundary, and the semiosphere, to elucidate how the sign of the apartment constitutes dread within Korean society and to submit the discourse of K-dystopia to critical scrutiny. Reading that discourse as a mode of self-description reorganized under the conditions of transnational circulation and global-platform legibility after the global success of Squid Game (2021), the study attends to the local surplus that such naming fails to carry across, declining nonetheless to consign it to the untranslatable. Two movements compose the argument. Beyond the film, the specificity of the Korean apartment is bound to the discourse of K-dystopia so as to disclose a dread that circulation leaves untranslated; within the film, scene analysis traces the visual codification of interior against exterior, the graduated nullification of the other, and the closure of the boundary through the ossification of self-description. Diegetic exclusion and discursive subsumption prove to be a single semiotic operation nested at two magnitudes, a matryoshka isomorphism in which the recurring unease articulated in Korean viewer reviews may be read as registering the homology of the two. Untranslated dread, so situated, opens onto a productive site of reappropriation and emergence.