Ha Jung-woo's 'The People Upstairs' Lands on Netflix Three Months After Theatrical Run

Ha Jung-woo's fourth directorial effort, the R-rated comedy The People Upstairs (윗집 사람들), is now streaming on Netflix globally, having launched on March 26, 2026, as confirmed by Netflix. The film, which premiered at the 30th Busan International Film Festival in September 2025 before hitting Korean theaters on December 3, marks the latest in a growing wave of Korean theatrical-to-streaming releases reshaping the industry's distribution patterns. With Ha pulling triple duty as writer, director, and lead actor alongside co-stars Gong Hyo-jin, Lee Hanee, and Kim Dong-wook, the project is his most ambitious creative undertaking since he began directing with Rollercoaster in 2013. His turn as the uninhibited Mr. Kim drew warm notices at Busan and remains the film's most talked-about performance. That verdict makes the global Netflix debut feel less like a consolation prize and more like the right stage for the right moment.

The film centers on two married couples living in the same apartment building whose lives collide over noise complaints and an increasingly uncomfortable dinner party. Ha plays the uninhibited Mr. Kim, whose nightly activities with his wife Su-kyung (played by Lee Hanee) cause serious disturbances for the couple downstairs, Jeong-ah (Gong Hyo-jin) and Hyun-soo (Kim Dong-wook). When the downstairs couple invites their upstairs neighbors over for dinner to address the noise issue, what begins as an awkward confrontation spirals into provocative revelations about modern marriage and intimacy, as confirmed by production company BY4M Studio in their official synopsis. The setup weaponizes the universal tension of shared-wall apartment living before escalating to something more unsettling: the dinner table as a confessional, where four near-strangers find themselves disclosing things they have never said aloud to their own spouses. The comedy is real. So is the discomfort underneath it, and Ha's screenplay earns both.

The film is a remake of Spanish director Cesc Gay's 2020 work Sentimental, itself an adaptation of his stage play Los vecinos de arriba. Ha spoke about his approach in an interview with Korea JoongAng Daily, stating he wanted to "go all the way" with the level of expression after criticism of his previous films for being too restrained. "The thing I heard the most about my previous works was that some of the lines were inaudible and that I should've gone further in terms of the storyline," Ha explained, adding that he deliberately pursued an R-rating this time to fully explore the material's provocative themes.

Despite its adult-rated content, the film keeps explicit material off-screen, relying instead on exaggerated sound effects and rapid-fire dialogue to convey its comedic and risqué elements. James Marsh of the South China Morning Post, reviewing the film at BIFF, praised Ha's performance as "one of the film's highlights" and called it his "most accomplished directorial effort to date," while noting the film "could have gone further" with its exploration of sexual openness. The South China Morning Post review emphasized that despite the provocative premise, the film ultimately "reinforces monogamy and traditional family values."

The theatrical release on December 3, 2025, saw the film open on 752 screens across South Korea, debuting in third place at the box office with 25,425 viewers on opening day, as reported by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC). By year's end, the film had accumulated approximately US$3.6 million from 546,433 admissions, a modest but respectable performance for an adult-rated comedy in a competitive holiday season. The Netflix release three months later follows the increasingly common windowing strategy that allows Korean films to maximize theatrical revenue before reaching global streaming audiences. For a dialogue-heavy comedy that depends on sharp timing and chemical reactions between four performers, Netflix's subtitling infrastructure opens the material to international viewers who missed the theatrical window entirely, and who are now discovering what Korean cinema insiders already knew from Busan.

Ha's directorial filmography now includes Rollercoaster (2013), Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (2015), Lobby (2024), and this latest work. In press interviews following the film's premiere, Ha jokingly mentioned he's already "looking for European hidden gems to potentially remake" for his next project, suggesting this adaptation model may continue to inform his directorial choices. Meanwhile, he's been filming a tvN black comedy series scheduled for March 2026, keeping his dual career as actor-director in full motion.