While *Flat Girls* has an undertone of girls' love, its primary focus is on social class and how it affects our interactions with people and the world.
The movie seeks to illustrate the various dimensions of gaps in relationships: love, power, interests, and even survival. Each relationship has many layers, each with its own texture. Our interpretations of relationships and thoughts profoundly influence our decisions.
This film centers on characters who cannot escape their own values, cultural standards, and worldviews. They are all trapped in the same flat—constrained by their perspectives and circumstances.
The performances are stellar, and the visual storytelling through cinematography adds unique depth, using the distance between floors to illustrate the vast gaps between individuals from different backgrounds. No matter how close they feel to one another, one must look up while the other looks down. Yet, if they don’t even attempt to understand each other, nothing will ever improve.
These characters share a complex dynamic—there's love and care, but it is entangled in a web of expectations and circumstances that keep them apart. Their differences in class backgrounds, experiences, and worldviews make it incredibly difficult to truly connect. It’s a tragic story about people yearning for connection yet remaining trapped in their own worlds and mindsets.
Additionally, the gap between reality and our expectations deeply affects and conflicts us. It creates cognitive dissonance, making us miserable as we struggle to accept that this gap may never close.
When we exist in the same environment with the same mindset, breaking free from that situation becomes incredibly challenging. If we don’t expand our worldview, it will remain unchanged—people can only see within their limited scope of the world.
It's tragic, isn’t it? The thought that we might never achieve all the things we desire in life is daunting. At the same time, it conveys that sometimes we simply lack the means to pursue our ideals. Or, often enough, we just don’t want to put in the effort at all.
Ultimately, there likely won’t be a beautiful resolution as we hope for; there won’t be any ideal relationships either. In the end, it’s just people trying to live their lives based on what they have and know—doing their best within their circumstances and mindsets regarding their situations.
However, in my opinion, the film leaves too much open for audience interpretation. Conflicts remain unresolved, and conversations are left hanging. It wraps up so abruptly that we’re left to draw our own conclusions on most of the storylines.