Under-cooked and over-praised, this woman-in-jeopardy thriller has Roman Polanski on the brain (mostly ROSEMARY’S BABY/’68 and THE TENANT/’76), but can’t pull it off. Here, the young bride’s foreboding new apartment is in Bucharest; her ambitious husband is always at work and thinks she has an over-active imagination; a new friend from down the hall goes missing; weird noises are coming thru the walls; a man directly across the street stares thru the window at her all night long (she stupidly waves at him); and the city is on the lookout for a serial killer. But hey!, she’s probably just got new town/foreign adjustment jitters. Writer/director Chloe Okuno, in her feature debut, treats our pretty victim as if she were Lana Turner in some 1940s movie, lounging around all day waiting for something bad to happen or hubby to come home. Whichever comes first. Supposedly an actress, maybe she’d sign up for language classes, an acting lab, audit a college course to help her Romanian, go to the movies to hear it spoken or keep the tv on to see if osmosis kicked in verbally. (When she does go out to a film, it’s in English: WAIT UNTIL DARK/’67 with Audrey Hepburn in jeopardy. The one good joke in the pic.) How ‘bout a cooking or culture class, and a stop at the fruit market on the way back. (Even Lana might do that, just to surprise hubby when he got home. Then he’d be late, supper burnt and she’d be even more miserable.) Perhaps if the acting were stronger or the pacing & rhythm as uncannily right as in a Polanski film we might tumble for the situation. (Only the creepy villain really comes across.) And with the cast given all the time in the world to pick up their cues, every story beat has plenty of time to fall apart . . . or fall flat.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As you’ve likely seen ROSEMARY’S BABY, try THE TENANT/’76, still seriously overlooked Polanski. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-tenant-1976.html
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