‘Wall To Wall’ Ending Explained: Who Is Making The Noise?

Netflix’s new Korean psychological thriller Wall to Wall takes the relatable horror of being broke, living in an apartment you can’t afford, and enduring noisy neighbors —  and then cranks it up to 11. Though it first appears to be about the struggles of a house-poor everyman dealing with falsified noise complaints from his neighbors, the film gradually reveals the web of corruption, lies, and murderous schemes hiding just below the surface of a crowded apartment complex in Seoul.

And that web is tangled — so tangled that it’s easy to lose track of who exposes who, who frames who for what, and just who is making all the noise? We at Decider have all the answers you need to understand the ending of Wall to Wall.

First, a recap: Noh Woo-sung (Kang Ha-neul) is a finance bro living in squalor after investing all his money into buying an apartment to combat the cutthroat housing market in Seoul. He can’t pay his mortgage, he can’t sell the place because of declining housing rates, and worst of all, he has to deal with incessant noise in his complex coming from an unknown source. When his neighbors start blaming him for the noise, an exhausted Woo-sung sets out to prove his innocence, eventually uncovering the elaborate scheme behind it all. Read on to have all your questions answered about the ending of Wall to Wall.

Wall To Wall Ending Explained: Who Is Making The Noise?

Strap in, everyone — this is going to get messy. Initially, Woo-sung teams up with his upstairs neighbor Yeong Jin-ho (Seo Hyeon-woo) to take down the complex’s resident representative Jeon Eun-hwa (Yeom Hye-ran). The two believe that she is making the noise, since her husband bought Woo-sung’s apartment along with three other floors in the complex in a plan to buy the whole building up for the sake of property value. After the two try and fail to investigate Eun-hwa’s penthouse, Woo-sung makes a startling discovery. That phone that was connected to the speaker planted in Woo-sung’s apartment? It turns out the only place that that phone can find a WiFi connection is in Jin-ho’s apartment. That’s right — Jin-ho was making the noise all along.

When Woo-sung sneaks into Jin-ho’s apartment, what he sees is shocking: walls plastered with information on all the complex’s tenants, security camera footage from all the apartments in the building, and video interviews of various tenants framing Woo-sung as a violent lunatic. We then learn Jin-ho’s true plan: as a freelance journalist, he is determined to expose the poorly-built construction of the complex and its deadly consequences. He wants to use Woo-sung to exemplify these consequences: Jin-ho’s false exposé casts him as a man so driven to madness by the excessive noise caused by the building’s poor construction that he kills all of his neighbors and then himself. He even paid off tenants like the residents of 1301 to frame Woo-sung for violent acts all throughout the film. 

After Jin-ho murders the woman from 1301 for threatening to disobey him, he catches Woo-sung and tries to murder him too. To save his life, Woo-sung convinces Jin-ho to change his plan — Woo-sung tells Jin-ho that he will help murder Eun-hwa and that he can pin it on the woman from 1301, contributing the murder to her rising stress about rising rent prices and being kicked out. Jin-ho agrees to the plan, and the two take a trip to the penthouse.

Eun-hwa And The Corruption Of The Complex:

Donning black masks, the two break into Eun-hwa’s home and tie her and her husband up. Jin-ho monologues about why he constructed his plan in the first place. You see, he and Eun-hwa have history: back when she was a prosecutor, Eun-hwa blocked Jin-ho’s story about the building’s poor construction from being published.

From the moment Jin-ho moved in, he had been planning his revenge — he knew that Eun-hwa was buying up all the apartments because of a prospective increase in property value, so he has been causing all the noise to drive the complex’s value rates down. And even if he has to frame a few innocent bystanders for murder, he’ll do what he needs to do to get his story out. 

As Jin-ho searches the apartment for the ledger containing proof of the corrupt construction of the building, Eun-hwa asks Woo-sung to help her, saying that she would help him with his apartment in return. Woo-sung frees her, and bloody chaos breaks out — unable to find the ledger, Jin-ho murders Eun-hwa’s husband and suffers a fatal wound from a kitchen knife in the process. Eun-hwa urges Woo-sung to kill Jin-ho, saying that she will take care of everything for him. Woo-sung hesitates, clearly torn, but Jin-ho collapses before he can take any action. No longer needing Woo-sung’s assistance, Eun-hwa beats him bloody. 

Does Woo-Sung Survive?

Revealing that she hid the ledger inside a book on the table beside her, she arrogantly laments the ridiculousness of Jin-ho’s accusations. She says that noise is a human problem, and that improving the building’s construction would only make it harder for people like Woo-sung to afford to buy apartments. Just as she is about to deliver a deadly blow to Woo-sung, Jin-ho springs up and strangles Eun-hwa to death.

Jin-ho collapses once again, unable to move. As Woo-sung finds the document proving that he signed his apartment away to Eun-hwa’s husband, Jin-ho tells him to bring him the ledger. Woo-sung refuses, saying, “Stop telling me what to do, you motherf*ckers.” He takes both documents and burns them in the oven, and then turns up the highly volatile gas leaking from a wire that Jin-ho cut earlier. As Woo-sung exits the building, an explosion causes the penthouse to burst into flames, leading the entire building to come crumbling down.

Woo-sung wakes up in the hospital with his mother by his side. He is injured and bandaged up, but still very much alive, unlike Jin-ho and Eun-hwa. Concerned for her son, Woo-sung’s mother takes him back to his childhood home in the country.

What Happened To The Building?

Woo-sung’s mother tells him that he can stay in her home for as long as he’d like. The countryside is peaceful, and a much healthier place to live than the big city of Seoul with its toxic capitalist culture. But still, Woo-sung just can’t stay away. He takes his mom’s truck and drives back to the city and, to the audience’s shock, re-enters his building and old apartment. The complex never really collapsed — it was all just a figment of his unsound mind. 

As he stands in his living room, he hears strange thuds and muffled noises through the walls. Is it his upstairs neighbor, or the one from downstairs? He doesn’t know. All he knows is that the noise will continue even with Jin-ho gone. Noise is inevitable in a bustling city where everyone is squeezed together in expensive, poorly-built apartment complexes. Woo-sung begins to laugh to himself, baffled by the sheer absurdity of his endless suffering. 

Watch Wall to Wall now on Netflix.