‘The Tenants’ is Unprecedented Horror for Unprecedented Times [Fantasia 2024 Review]
There was a sentiment floating around the internet this week after President Joe Biden announced his plan (on Twitter, of all places) to end his presidential re-election campaign. While most people were reacting to the news with either elation or dread, the sentimentality among millennials and those younger remained the same—everyone is tired of living in “unprecedented times.” The broad impression is that every bad thing feels like it’s happening for the first time ever, and collectively—the aggregate weight of it all—is exhausting. Even deadly. Contextually, writer/director Yoon Eun-kyoung’s The Tenants culls from that anxiety expertly. For audiences like myself, The Tenants is a glossy, searing, tension-packed anxiety attack with no hope of stopping.
Shin-dong (Kim Dae-geon) is living in a nebulous, near-future Seoul. Via introductory voiceover, he bemoans unmanageable air pollution, skyrocketing rental costs, and chronic fatigue, all of which, collectively, cultivate a distinct kind of modern, Kafkaesque mundanity. Everyone, especially Shin-dong, is working as hard as they can to escape the grind, to move, quite literally in The Tenants’ case, to greener pastures. All that suffering. All that torture. The late nights. The compromised social relationships. Sacrificing a vivid life for work. In the end, Shin-dong is convinced that it’ll be worth it.
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In Seoul, some residents live in what’s called a Jjokbang or piece room. These small rooms, often reserved for poor urban dwellers or elderly residents living alone, are partitioned from much larger rooms. Then, they’re rented out, regularly without a deposit. Think of splitting your living room into four distinct quarters and leasing out the three you’re not using. The Tenants, like the best South Korean genre fare (comparisons to Parasite are apt and expected), stretches that phenomenon to nightmarish, absurd ends.
Shin-dong, stuck in a perennial grind at Happy Meat (an artificial meat plant), is at risk of being evicted. His landlord, an actual child (named Mr. Bastard), wants to renovate and needs him out to do it. Shin-dong evades eviction with the help of a friend and an introduction to the wolwose system. All he needs to do is sublease part of his home to new tenants. He does so quickly, inviting a new tenant (Heo Dong-won) and his silent, infantile wife (Park So-hyun) into his apartment. But they don’t want the living room. Instead, they concede they’d be more comfortable living in the bathroom.
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The world of Yoon Eun-kyoung’s The Tenants is a familiar one, a dystopian vision of future Seoul with shades of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender is the Flesh. Familiar or not, the efficacy remains as The Tenants unravels into a Lynchian nightmare of absurd housing rights and, for good measure, J-horror ghost tropes. The horror is innate in Shin-dong gaming a system designed to never let him win. For every ostensible victory, there are a dozen new obstacles in his way. His new tenants literalize a true, flaming horror that will outlive them all.
Stylishly, and (for once) meaningfully shot in black-and-white, Yoon Eun-kyoung’s feature is as confident a horror release as any. While principally allegorical, The Tenants unconventionally culls from genre tropes, whether that’s eyes peering through holes in the ceiling or specters billowing beneath bedsheets. An exposition-heavy third act fumbles in a contemporary, hand-holding way, using flashbacks to contextualize a twist the audience has likely already pieced together. But it’s a small sin in a movie as probing, intelligent, and existentially scary as this.
Toward the start, a friend of Shin-dong’s remarks how cities are organisms and the people living there make up their cells. If the people leave, the city dies. Parallel real-world discourse is present in everything from return-to-office orders to blatant governmental concessions that inflation really isn’t all that bad. The end game is the same. Capitalism wants you dead, and like the most famous horror villains of our time, that can never really die. Its shape and texture might change, but the evil at its core is forever.
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The Tenants
Summary
The Tenants is a glossy, searing anxiety attack with no hopes of stopping.
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