[HanCinema's Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival Review] "The Tenants"

Sin-dong (played by Kim Dae-geon) lives in a bleak, black-and-white city with serious air quality issues. Nevertheless, Sin-dong really doesn't want to leave his apartment, a fate that seems inevitable when the rent goes up. But a possible solution comes to mind when a friend tells Sin-dong about how subletting prevents landlords from evicting people. In a pinch, Sin-dong reluctantly agrees to take in an eerie, unnamed man played by Heo Dong-won and his equally unnerving wife.

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While this framing makes the eerie unnamed man sound like the villain of "The Tenants" in practice the film much more about Sin-dong deleterious mental state. He works long hours at a thankless job mostly because he doesn't have anything else to do. Co-workers lecture him about this pointless work ethic, noting that it only makes him seem that much more pathetic. With an empty life bereft of meaning, Sin-dong can only focus on his subletting scheme, despite not even really wanting to think about it most of the time.

What makes Sin-dong such a genuinely sad character is that even the contacts in his phones have derisive nicknames. Sin-dong acts like he doesn't even care about them, but sinks further into ennui when he loses track of these few tenuous connections to the world. The general cheerfulness of his tenant makes for a marked contrast since, as noted, a life lived in a bathroom doesn't really seem like much of a life at all.

Is Sin-dong any better though? Sure, he has a job- doing what though? His life isn't improving, nor is anyone else's. The closest thing that Sin-dong has to an idol is an obvious huckster we only ever see through screens, promising a better or life or at least, a better paycheck, if Sin-dong can do...something. If there's any particularly coherent rules to the society Sin-dong lives in, "The Tenants" does not at any point get into what those rules might be.

"The Tenants" is, in a word, classic Kafkaesque style horror, where the scary part isn't any particular frightening imagery so much as it is the crushing realization that Sin-dong will never aspire to be anything more than a petty landlord because all he has are petty dreams. The main scary excitement in "The Tenants" comes from nightmare sequences, or possibly realities, where Sin-dong fantasizes about being usurped by someone of truly untouchable rank in society.

Of course, no one will touch Sin-dong either, is part of the irony. "The Tenants" features semi-futuristic technology in the form of cell phones that produce holograms of whoever he's speaking to. Even that special effect isn't as fancy as I'm making it sound- writer/director Yoon Eun-kyung just uses basic editing tricks to make the people he's talking to abruptly disappear. It's exactly the kind of semi-futuristic technology this rather grim world deserves. It doesn't look impressive, and doesn't even really serve much purpose except to further alienate Sin-dong from what little of the world around him that he even understands.

Written by William Schwartz

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"The Tenants" is directed by Yoon Eun-kyung, and features Kim Dae-geon, Heo Dong-won. No release date in Korea yet.