FANTASIA24 REVIEW: Seibja [The Tenants] [2024]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 90 minutes
Release Date: December 4th, 2024 (South Korea)
Director(s): Eun-Kyung Yoon
Writer(s): Eun-Kyung Yoon

Think about why you can’t leave here.

Shin-dong (Kim Dea-geon) is about to be evicted by a child dubbed “Mr. Bastard” in his phone. Why? Because the boy and his mother want to remodel the building. He tries to tell Shin-dong that it’s for his own good. That he shouldn’t still be there anyway and that this is an opportunity to upgrade. Except, of course, that Shin-dong can’t upgrade. He can barely afford this tiny apartment in a highly polluted Seoul despite having zero social life beyond hologram calls with a friend dubbed “Mr. Dork” who may or may not be AI-generated considering how often Shin-dong simply hangs-up on him.

Well, Shin-dong should be nicer to Mr. Dork considering he provides an answer to his woes. Because of how poor conditions are in the not-so-unbelievable future setting of Yoon Eun-kyoung’s The Tenants, there are options to put a wrench in a landlord’s plans by becoming a landlord yourself. If Shin-dong rents space out, either via Wolwolse (subletting a single room) or Cheonjangse (subletting the ceiling crawlspace), the building’s owners will need to consider all those other tenants in their eviction process. Maybe it’s not really enough to stop them, but it is a lot of additional red tape to decide it might not be worth the trouble.

Unlike a traditional horror film, Yoon uses horror tropes in very satirical ways. For instance: Shin-dong’s advertisement isn’t up for a minute before he gets his first prospective resident. And when the stranger says he’ll stop by to check the place out that night, the doorbell rings as soon as the clock turns 9pm as though he was waiting to press the button. If that’s not creepy enough, Shin-dong opens the door to a giant of a man (Heo Dong-won) and his new, diminutive bride. The husband talks as if they’ve been friends forever. The wife perpetually smiles with a face-contorting squint that looks painful. Have these two arrived from a parallel universe? Are they going to kill Shin-dong during the night?

Considering they reject his offer of the living room and instead request the bathroom as their permanent residence, nothing is off-the-table. Cue the jump scares of him standing above Shin-dong’s bed at night or her recreating the Ju-on poster by staring through the cracked open bathroom doorway and you can’t help laughing at how strangely this dynamic progresses. Because these two aren’t Wolwolse novices like Shin-dong. They know the rules much better—almost to the point where they might be manipulating him to secure the upper-hand in a relationship where he should have control. Add a third tenant in the ceiling, stolen property, and a violent streak and Shin-dong is suddenly ready to do whatever he can to break the lease he desperately fought to retain.

Without saying too much, I’ll simply mention that the prospect of a promotion with new lodging included sparks a chain of events that seems beneficial for all parties until actions prove everyone involved have very different priorities. And so, we remember the words spoken at the beginning, words that also adorn the poster: “What keeps you from leaving?” The answer is almost always money. It’s like when idiot conservatives tell poverty-line Americans to “just move” as though people are lining up to purchase homes that now find themselves on the path of ever-worsening, global warming-induced weather phenomena.

The system teases us with the potential of prosperity as a means to overwork and underpay. It creates a false sense of supply and demand that pits employees against each other for promotions that are ultimately dissolved once all the work to win it is complete. And much like poor, white Red Staters voting for a party that blatantly enriches itself off their continued misfortune, those like Shin-dong pretend they have options by reminding themselves others have it worse. It doesn’t matter that they’re one bad day closer to a “ceiling person” than they’ll ever be to becoming a millionaire, the lie deludes them into believing their ship will come in. They feed the machine and receive nothing but empty hope in return.

It leads to a memorable finale wherein Shin-dong finds himself entering his ceiling for the last signature he needs to leave. This is where the true horror begins because all the frustration he’s laughed off to this point force him to wonder if he’s been the Cheonjangse this whole time. Is the result a dream? An awakening to the truth? Or the futile reality we’re all doomed to experience if we ever dare to think we have what it takes to ascend. Because those other people who tried and failed just didn’t work hard enough or didn’t know the “trick.” No, unless you’re that one-in-a-million with an unbeatable luck streak, there’s no getting out. You’re either born with money or marry into money. The rest of us are cogs maintaining the status quo of our own inferiority.