The Tenants, by South Korean director Yoon Eun-kyoung, is a genre-blending horror film that derives its tension from contracts and policies. The film screened at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.
In a vaguely dystopian Seoul set sometime in the near future, the city has been divided into numbered districts and living costs have escalated beyond comprehension. White-collar worker Shin-dong, unable to pay his rent, learns about a loophole: he can rent out part of his home to his own tenants, which complicates his housing rights and makes it nearly impossible for his landlord to evict him.
However, this very contractual exploit turns from a lifesaver to his worst nightmare: his tenants, who choose to live in the bathroom, are an eerily eccentric newlywed couple who seem to never stop smiling, don’t respect his privacy, and come with unreadable intentions. With this the film subverts classic home invasion tropes: instead of being broken into, capitalism forces Shin-dong to willingly allow these unknown forces into his home. The tenants frequently go out for mysterious night walks, which wakes Shin-dong up at late hours, and spend their time in the bathroom sitting still and frantically breathing, which they claim to be a spiritual practice.
While the tenants’ odd behaviors naturally set off Shin-dong’s (and our) fear responses, they rarely seem to pose any true threat. Instead, their presence creates a claustrophobia for Shin-dong, whose rare few hours away from his menial job are now just as unbearable. “Kafkaesque” comes to mind when describing the film’s premise, but this becomes more apt as Shin-dong continually attempts to get rid of his problem by contractual means, which of course fails each time.
Things get much more complicated when the tenants decide to lease part of the house to tenants of their own, invoking the same loophole Shin-dong used to avoid eviction. This recursive tenant, who lives through a hatch in the bathroom ceiling, never leaves her quarters and seemingly poses an actual danger to Shin-dong. The film shows the absurdity of proper process, and as the film goes on this ineptitude becomes the primary source of horror. While the tenants are currently harmless, they seem able to snap at any moment—yet Shin-dong must wait on contractual obligations to even leave his home.
There are effectively three locations in the film: Shin-dong’s home, an outdoor bench in a park he walks by, and the office. Aside from helping the viewer empathize with the colorlessness of his routine, this makes the most out of the film’s low budget. Additionally, The Tenants is shot in black-and-white photography that helps lend atmospheric tension to its rather plain setpieces.
This tension is frequently diffused with absurd humor. The tenants’ eeriness comes from their uncanny comic qualities: the male tenant is a tall, lanky, mad hatter type, while his much shorter wife’s unchanging smile lends her a doll-like appearance. Additionally, Shin-dong’s landlord is for some reason a child, maybe illustrating how the beneficiaries of capitalism are often picked at random. These moments of whimsy contrast with the inherent absurdity of Shin-dong needing to rent out his home in order to afford to live in it, a problem many in the film’s society are illustrated to face.
A lot of interesting ideas are at play in The Tenant, which come together into an admirable—if not fully realized—new form of procedural thriller. Blending genres, a staple of recent South Korean cinema, can be effective, but the film seems burdened by the split between its commentary-driven dystopian core and its tropey Korean horror moments—especially by its somewhat contrived ending. However, while the central fear of strangers in one’s house is nothing new, its subversion into a critique of systemic ineptitude is certainly a cleverly unique choice.
Our writer Ryan Yau is reporting on the 28th Fantasia International Film Festival, running from July 28th to August 4th, 2024.
