Tunnel

Tunnel (터널, 2016) is Kim Seong-hun's South Korean disaster thriller, available to watch online on iFILM. Car salesman Lee Jung-soo is driving home with a birthday cake for his daughter when the brand-new mountain tunnel groans and caves in over his head.

Pinned under tons of concrete, he has his car, two bottles of water, and a phone at 78 percent. A few hours, he figures, and they'll dig him out. Above ground, a very different film unfolds: the rescue bogs down in red tape, officials tally the cost, news crews milk the disaster for ratings, and his wife Se-hyun refuses to let anyone write him off. Ha Jung-woo spends most of the runtime alone in a cramped, dark cab, holding the screen with nothing but his face and voice.

Kim turns a survival setup into a sharp satire of how systems respond to catastrophe — the longer the dig drags on, the clearer it gets who treats the buried man as a person and who treats him as a line in a report. It's tense, unexpectedly funny in spots, and refuses the easy heroic finish. Stream Tunnel (2016) online on iFILM.