"TENANTS" (2024) Takes You Through The Seven Apartments You Visit in Hell (REVIEW)
You’d think there would be more films about apartment living. Sitcoms have usually cornered the market in portraying the humor of cohabitating, usually for laughs. Living in a building surrounded by strangers can be a perilous experience. But how well do we really know our neighbors? Do we try to or even want to? It’s a simple, but interesting premise for several horror films. “Tenants,” the new film from directors Johnathan Louis Lewis, Sean Mesler, Buz Walick, and Blake Reigle, marries these concepts into an anthology that surprisingly hasn’t been made into a film yet.
“Tenants” takes place entirely in an apartment building, featuring seven different apartments with seven different tales of horror (though one of them is barely a segment, much to our delight. We’ll get there.) To the filmmakers’ credit, each of the segments features completely different stories, characters, and perspectives. The wraparound segment “You’re Not Supposed to Be Here” begins with a woman emerging from a membranous cocoon in the basement parking garage. We learn she’s Joni (co-writer and producer Mary O’Neil), a scared and confused woman looking for her sister as she encounters the Lovecraftian geometry of the building. As a neat device, she interacts with characters from the segments, mostly before they start in earnest.
“Acting Rash” features Christa Collins as Amber, a former child star who’s now being rejected by Syfy Originals in her 40s (like she’d even put “Mechaconda” on her CV, but I digress). She tries a new skincare routine before an important audition, which leads to a quickly-spreading rash, and deadly consequences. The film’s opening salvo is a delightfully ghoulish tale that would fit comfortably in a late 90s “Tales from the Crypt” episode. “Hoarder” switches gears to tell a sad story about Jude, (Myles Cranford) a lonely man who can’t clean his filthy apartment after the loss of his beloved wife. His adult son (Acquah Dansoh) tries to get him to listen to reason, but the widower is so all-consumed by his grief, that it threatens to swallow him up, literally. “Hoarder” is a little long, but it goes somewhere sorrowful, surreal, and absurd. I don’t want to ruin the ending, but It features some inspired design work with what must have been a budget of zero dollars. In fact, the film’s low budget is apparent in every segment, but it’s buoyed by some well-placed creativity.
Belinda (Clarke Wolfe), weighing whether or not she can forfeit that security deposit.
Next up is “The Photograph,” which follows the building’s super Leonard (Douglas Vermeeren), a delusional stalker being haunted by a girl, who…well, it’s pretty obvious. There are some good jump scares, but once you figure out the twist, you’re mostly waiting for it to wrap up. “Nah,” is maybe one minute long, and barely qualifies as a short, but it’s a hilariously minimalist palette cleanser before we move onto the darkness of “Laundry Day.” We meet a husband and wife arguing, following her recent miscarriage, when she tries to distract herself by doing laundry. What she discovers in the basement laundry room leads to one of the most insane endings seen in any anthology segment, ever. Director Jonathan Louis Lewis mines the power of the suggestion for an image that will haunt me for a long time.
The final segment, “Need Anything,” is also the best of the bunch. Clarke Wolfe and Fayna Sanchez play the type of roommates who should never have lived together in the first place. When one plans to murder the other, things go awry. Then they go even further awry as Wolfe and Sanchez go for broke in a finale that nobody will see coming. You won’t expect to see much of the film’s practical effects budget at the start of this segment, but it makes for some splatter-ific horror comedy. The ending might not explain enough, or anything, which might rub people the wrong way, but this late in the film, it was nice to laugh that much. It hardly matters after all we’ve seen. This building should be condemned for the ghosts, alone.
I wish all the segments had posters. Even “Nah.”
By the time the frame story wraps up with a muddled ending and some iffy CGI, I didn’t mind so much after being entertained by what came before. “Tenants” excels at shining a light on the many different lives that coexist in your apartment building. There’s still plenty of ground left to cover like that damn neighbor with the...oh, you know the one. What’s that guy’s deal? “Tenants” knows and it’s worse than you can imagine.
“Tenants” is now available on Video on Demand.
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