Metacritic reviews

This is a staggering achievement, the sort of nonfiction project that takes unfathomable guts and skill.

This is a film you haven’t seen before from a place you’ll never visit, a first-class example of bravery and reportage melding into an filmed testament. It’s not just that it’s nailbiting. The unease lingers long after viewing, though, for every person associated with it.

A powerful and important look behind the curtain, Beyond Utopia is one hell of a cinematic nail-biter and a stark reminder of the human rights violations being committed every day in 2023.

What we’ve forgotten about, for too long, is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. Beyond Utopia looks behind the wall and shines a light.

Beyond Utopia contains background material on the history, culture and travails of North Korea that’s necessary but clunkily presented. The filmmakers also take an irksome turn toward the predictable during some of the travel sequences, adding conventional piano-and-strings movie music. But the rest of the movie is fresh and compelling.

The level of brainwashing, privation and systemic abuse makes for an enraging, confronting watch, but it’s refreshingly focused on the people, rather than geopolitics. Just like for its two fleeing families, Beyond Utopia is an emotional journey.

It’s an outstanding documentary.

The film never fully commits to being a pure North Korean escape documentary, and its weakest moments come when it tries to be a general interest film about North Korea that happens to feature escape footage.

The searing images of various gulags, public executions, and private beatings will not be easily forgotten.

An astonishing real-life geopolitical thriller with a very run-of-the-mill historical explainer grafted to it like a remora, Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia is so packed with high-stakes tension and nail-biting set-pieces that it’s fairly easy, and probably even ideal, to ignore its clunky structuring and expositional choices.