The title on this 2006 horror film has been variously given as APT, A.P.T., & A-P-T, always in caps, & why it wouldn't just be Apt. as in English I dunno. The affection is sometimes repaired & it is just given as Apartment.

The Korean horror film was based on an illustrated novel, & takes advantage of adult comics' style of framing scenes with considerable artfulness. A self-mutilating woman is watching television, weeping, & carving gouges out of her skin, until she has lost sufficent blood that she dies.

After this effectively frightful prelude we are introduced to Oh Se-jin (So-young Ko), who works in the fashion industry. She's in trouble with her boss, who didn't like Miss Oh's holiday sales display window display. She has no family & her job is everything to her. This professional crisis seems to trigger paranoia.

In the subway, a weeping woman (Yuko Fueki) follows her & asks, "Aren't you lovely?" then tries to hold tight to her to leap onto the subway tracks. Miss Oh survives the attempted homicide-suicide by this perfect stranger, but some part of her understands the feeling of wanting to die but not to die alone.

Lights blink in the apartment block across the courtyard from her apartment. She becomes increasingly depressed, fearful, convinced she's being haunted by the stranger who died alone on the subway tracks.

While out for a jog, she gets to know a young woman in a wheelchair, Yu-yeon (Jang Hee-jin). They are mutually lonely, & a mutual need of friendship draws them together.

The wheelchair woman lives in the apartment across the street, where she's occasionally assisted by another woman in the building who is a highly abusive caretaker.

A man commits suicide at a few minutes to ten, about the same time the apartment block's lights blink. Miss Oh in her paranoid state of mind becomes convinced a series of suicides are linked somehow to those blinking lights, which act up always at 9:56 p.m.

Although compared to films as diverse as Ringu (1998) & Rear Window (1954), the better comparison would probably be to Roman Polanski's The Tenant (1986), as Miss Oh becomes embroiled in the supernatural due to her obsession with the apartment windows across the courtyard. She begins to map the windows of the apartments & track the residents' lives.

Violence, abuse, or suicides have occurred with unprecidented regularity. She begins trying to warn residents not to turn the lights off until ten, since only if lights go out at 9:56 does someone die. They think she's nuts, of course, & the fact that she's a peeper with binoculars doesn't make her seem any saner.

There's loads of suspense & paranoia in the vague chaotic plot. The ghost however is a little too generic in the "long haired girl" grouping typical of J-horror & often imitated in K-horror. One twist, though, is the revelation of a girlish male villain, a really strange crazy youth, a stand-out character in film generally too familiar.

A police detective (Seong-jin Kang) eventually realizes the apartment cases are indeed strange, as Sae-jin Oh had been claiming. The tale gets increasingly gaudy & scattered, as it turns out each & every resident of the Futune Apartments had victimized the ghost when she lived.

The key to the mystery is the wheelchair bound Yoo-seon, an orphan whom several people in the building had been helping care for, but who has been sureptitiously abused by all of them in one way or another. I won't give away the final revelation, but the seemingly chaotic plot does eventually draw itself together meaningfully, cruelly, tragically, & horrifically, for a reasonably satisfying horror-film experience.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl