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A supposed 19-plus sex comedy in Korea turns out to be two married couples talking in a flat while the ratings board clutches its pearls harder than any audience.

Hermit Off Script

I went in, saw the 19 years restriction on the screen, and my Western trained brain said, right, here comes the nudity quota and awkward sex comedy. Instead, you get four adults in one apartment, talking through their relationship mess like a stage play in an IMAX box. The biggest burst of action is the beating of Pikachu man upstairs, and the peak of erotism is the wife kissing him while you expect a neat little partner swap payoff. Instead the husband grabs Pikachu man for a furious kiss that feels like jealousy, panic, and gender panic all at once. No bodies on display, no cheap flashes, just dialogue and tension while Western cinema is still throwing bare skin at the lens to prove it is edgy. On an IMAX screen the whole thing becomes a theatre close up of faces you know from K-drama, and somehow that works better than any exploding city. Korean cinema keeps serving actual plays in cinemas while everyone else is still trying to sell you a body instead of a story.

The People Upstairs (2025) 윗집 사람들 Movie Trailer | EONTALK

The People Upstairs (2025) : Roast movie synopsis

Jeong-ah and Hyun-soo are a married couple in Seoul whose love life is so dead that they sleep in separate rooms and communicate by text, like flatmates who’ve lost the Wi-Fi password. Above them live Teacher Kim and Soo-kyeong, a sex-max pair whose nightly moans, thumps and acrobatics come through the ceiling louder than the news. After one too many earthquakes at 2 a.m., Jeong-ah invites the noisy neighbours down for a polite dinner, hoping for a grown-up chat about soundproofing. Instead, she gets Mr Kim, nicknamed Pikachu, and his therapist-slash-YouTube-coach wife, turning the evening into a live podcast about kinks, fantasies and open relationships. Over wine and side dishes, the two couples dissect their marriages, compare bedroom droughts to monsoon seasons upstairs, and then face an unexpected proposition that tests just how liberal the downstairs pair really are. The whole film stays locked in one apartment like a theatre play, adapted from the Spanish movie Sentimental, and still somehow earns a 19+ in Korea almost entirely through suggestive noises and machine-gun dialogue, with critics noting there is “nothing even vaguely considered erotic” on screen and the cast joking that “not even a wrist shows” while the rating board has a panic attack.

Cast and credits

Director: Ha Jung Woo
Writers: Ha Jung Woo, Lee Cha yeon, Seon Seung yeon
Main cast: Ha Jung Woo, Gong Hyo Jin, Kim Dong Wook, Lee Ha Nee
Composer: Dalpalan
Production company/studio: Walkhouse Company, Sidus Pictures, distributed by By4M Studio
Runtime: 107 minutes
Release year and platform: 2025 theatrical release in South Korea after festival premiere at Busan.

What does not make sense

• A 19-plus style restricted rating for a film where, as the cast says, not even a wrist shows.
• Marketing it like a sex comedy while the real kink is four adults talking honestly for two hours.
• Using IMAX to show one living room and a dinner table, while blockbusters waste it on empty CGI.
• Western cinema still assuming R rating means skin, while Korea quietly proves dialogue can be more dangerous.
• Ratings boards losing their minds over words, but totally fine with yet another beating of Pikachu man.

Sense check / The numbers

1. The People Upstairs is a 2025 South Korean comedy drama, Ha Jung Woo’s fourth film as director, adapted from Cesc Gay’s Spanish film Sentimental and largely confined to a single apartment.
2. The film runs 107 minutes, premiered at the 30th Busan International Film Festival on 18 September 2025, and opened in Korean cinemas on 3 December 2025, debuting in third place with about 25,000 viewers and reaching around 186,000 admissions by 7 December 2025.
3. Actor Kim Dong Wook confirmed that the film received a restricted R rating in Korea without a single explicit scene, joking that they earned it purely through dialogue and that not even a wrist is shown.
4. Critics at Busan described it as a cheeky comedy of manners that never leaves the flat, uses sound and dialogue rather than nudity, and still ends up reinforcing monogamy and traditional family values amid all the suggestive noise.
5. The premise is brutally simple economics and drama craft: two couples, one dinner, one noisy upstairs flat, and one long night of offers, confessions, and emotional violence.

The sketch

Scene 1: Age rating roulette
Panel: Cinema foyer. A massive 19 plus sign glares above the poster. Two Western tourists whisper.
Tourist 1: So, full nudity then.
Local teen: Not even a wrist, mate. Just grown-ups talking.
Scene 2: IMAX theatre play
Panel: Huge IMAX screen showing four people at a dinner table in a tiny flat. Audience in 3D glasses lean forward.
Viewer 1: Wait, this is it
Viewer 2: Shh, they are about to emotionally implode.
Scene 3: Pikachu kiss chaos
Panel: Living room chaos. Pikachu man in the middle as wife and husband both lean in.
Wife: Fine, I will kiss him.
Husband: Move, I am not losing to Pikachu.

What to watch, not the show

• Rating boards that punish sexual talk harder than graphic violence.
• Marketing departments addicted to the word adult when the film is mostly therapy with wine.
• The economics of selling an IMAX ticket for what is basically a very well-lit stage play.
• Western habits that confuse skin with substance and assume laughs come only with humiliation.
• How Korean cinema keeps remaking foreign scripts into tight chamber pieces instead of bloated remakes.
• The long-term risk that even this kind of smart sex comedy will be watered down once global platforms start demanding uniform content.

The Hermit take

If you need naked bodies to feel adult, the most grown-up thing in this film will fly straight over your head. The danger is not the sex; it is the possibility that honest conversation might actually change someone.

Keep or toss

Keep the talky, theatre-like setup, the awkward dinner, and the refusal to throw in random nudity just to justify a rating.
Toss the stupid 19-plus label games and the expectation that comedy must either be pure slapstick or full exposure to count as fun.

Sources

• The People Upstairs 2025 film overview and production details, Wikipedia:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_Upstairs_(2025_film)
• The People Upstairs plot summary and basic info, IMDb:
  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37962136/
• Busan International Film Festival programme note for The People Upstairs:
  https://www.biff.kr/eng/html/program/prog_view.asp?c_idx=418&idx=82620
• Kim Dong wook interview on restricted rating without nudity, Maeil Business Newspaper:
  https://www.mk.co.kr/en/hot-issues/11487249
• Early review of The People Upstairs as cheeky sex comedy of manners, The Korea Times / South China Morning Post:
  https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/entertainment/films/20250924/biff-2025-the-people-upstairs-review-ha-jung-woo-excels-in-cheeky-sex-comedy
• Indonesian synopsis and cast list for The People Upstairs, DetikPop:
  https://www.detik.com/pop/korean-wave/d-8242603/sinopsis-the-people-upstairs-film-korea-rated-r-terbaru-2025