The Tenants: Fantasia Festival 2024 review

The Tenants is a beautifully disturbing debut from Yoon Eun-kyoung that will haunt your dreams.

Set in a near dystopian future, the Tenants follows Shin-dong a hardworking man who works for an artificial meat company. Because of the huge increase in pollution, South Korea is now under a dome but the air is still unbreathable.

Drowning in debt, and on the brink of eviction Shin-dong can’t make ends meet, no matter how hard he tries. He learns about a way he can slow down the eviction process while earning extra cash at the same time. All he has to do is find people desperate for a place to live who will happily pay rent for some space in his already crammed apartment. We then meet his two new tenants, a mysterious couple who decide to take up residency in his bathroom – yes, that’s right – his bathroom. Things get very strange and odd very quickly.

Presented in beautiful black and white director Yoon Eun-kyoung takes advantage of his minimal surroundings to give us something truly eerie and unsettling. Underneath it all, The Tenants brings to light the inequalities that a lot of South Koreans face and the conditions that they have to live in. We even see this in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, the cramped living conditions of the poor family.

There are moments of pure brilliance in The Tenants and to be honest, if this film was in colour (which it was originally) then I don’t it would have the same effect. The use of shadows and lighting really adds a thick atmospheric dread to the whole thing.

There is so much going on it’s exhausting, and I found this to be intentional. We feel the lead character struggles (a phenomenal performance from Heo Dong-won). All this mayhem is happening in a tiny apartment, it almost feels like this is also the inside of his head – too much going on for such a tiny space.

I’m very excited to see what this director comes up with next. It was an absolute honour to review his directorial debut because this guy is going places. The Tenants would be suited for fans of the early work of David Lynch, also, Hideo Nakata, and, Bong Joon-ho. This is a a surreal and odd film that would only be appreciated by those who can know and love the cinema it was born from.

The Tenants Official Plot (Fantasia)

In a dreary, near-future version of Seoul, citizens have become rather soulless as overpopulation, air pollution, and housing costs have reached an all-time high. Like most twenty-somethings, Shin-dong has been dedicating his life to the grind, isolating himself from friends and family in hopes of earning a promotion that comes with a transfer to a new utopian city called Sphere 2. But when his landlord starts threatening eviction, he has no choice but to resort to Wolwolse, a program that allows tenants to rent out parts of their space to other people.

Almost immediately, an interested party knocks on the door: a tall, eccentric gentleman and his seemingly mute wife, whom Shin-dong decides to take in despite their unusual request of residing in the bathroom instead of the living room. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures, and they seem agreeable enough… Or so he thought, until their strange behaviours start escalating into a true waking nightmare.