My Thoughts on Tenement
I think Tenement is the first Cambodian horror film I have ever seen, at least off the top of my head. and while I have wached a lot of Thai, horror Korean horror and Japanese horror, there’s something exciting about discovering a film from a place whose cinema you don’t know well.
Soriya is a young manga artist living in Japan who’s struggling to come up with an idea for her debut novel, who decides to return to Cambodia, her home country, with her boyfriend Daichi, and she plans to reconnect with her long-lost aunt, who lives in an old apartment complex called Metta.
Soriya clearly doesn’t feel fully connected to this place anymore, and her aunt treats her like both a guest and a stranger, and these quieter scenes worked well at building some unease, and then the ghostly little girl appears, firstly in Soriya’s dreams, and from there, everything starts falling apart, where strange deaths occur, and somehow they all seem linked to Soriya and her late mother.
The influences in Tenement are easy to spot, where the atmosphere has touches of Thai horror, and also a bit of Japanese style dread thrown in too, and I think it is fair to say the movie borrows from everywhere but doesn’t really fully find its own voice.
The main problem I had though is the pacing, as for a 90 minute movie, it feels strangely long, where the story keeps circling the same moments of suspense without really progressing, and there are also too many small red herrings, where I was waiting for a clever twist to happen, but that never arrives, and it felt like like the film wanted to surprise me but lost the courage halfway through.
Every time the film does finds a good rhythm, it shifts tone again, introducing different things that completely derails it, where it’s confusing and oddly detached from the rest of the story, and by the time we reach the final scene, my curiosity had been lost.
The technical side doesn’t help either. as the sound mixing was rough, where there were moments when the dialogue was nearly impossible to hear, then the music would suddenly blast so loud it drowned everything out, and even the visuals have quirks, where it made me wonder if it was intentional or just sloppy editing.
Overall though, I did respect the attempt though of what the film was trying to do, and it’s easy to criticize a film like this for not living up to its influences, but I think we should also acknowledge what it’s reaching for, as it clearly wants to be more than just a ghost story.
It’s trying to explore how the past refuses to stay buried, and how coming home doesn’t always mean finding comfort, but I just wish it had trusted that simplicity instead of throwing in extra layers that don’t fit.
Tenement is very rough around the edges, but it’s interesting to see a Cambodian filmmaker trying to carve out space in a genre that’s often dominated by bigger countries, and while it probably isn’t the film to put Cambodian horror on the map, but it’s a step in that direction.
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