“I feel like I’m stuck in the same place no matter how hard I try,” says Shin-dong (Kim Dea-gun), near the beginning of Yoon Eun-kyoung’s feature debut. In a city stricken with air pollution and exorbitant rents, Shin-dong works as a desk drone, sleeps in a cramped apartment, and dreams of a paradisiac beach, or at least of the cleaner, more modern Sphere 2. Yet when he is forced to sublet his bathroom to a pair of very strange, always grinning newlyweds (Heo Dong-won, Park So-hyun), the nightmarish realities nature of his life settles in.

While set in the future, this Kafkaesque dystopia cohabits with the features of today’s urban existence: alienating routine, online-only companionship and shrinking prospects, where the only escape lies in surrender to delusion and despair. At first witty, whimsical and weird, this eventually accommodates a bleak heart of darkness.