APARTMENT 1BR

Stars: Nicole Brydon Bloom, Alan Blumenfeld, Susan Davis, Naomi Grossman, Clayton Hoff, Giles Matthey, Taylor Nichols, Earnestine Phillips and Celeste Sully.
Writer/Director: David Marmor

Available in Australia on iTunes, Amazon, TelstraTV BoxOffice, Fetch TV, Youtube and on DVD from JB Hi-Fi. Distributed by Eagle Entertainment.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 

Recalling Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Michael Winner’s The Sentinel (1977) in its depiction of the paranoid untwirling of a young woman’s psyche, David Marmor’s Apartment 1BR is a similarly tightly-wrought, singularly-focussed exercise in psychological and existential terror.

Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom) is only just finding her feet as an adult. Her temp job, however thankless, is secure, and the distance she is putting between herself and her father brings a new sense of calm (as does the Zoloft). However, like a great many Los Angelinos, taking control of your mind while establishing your own small portion of the city is a daunting task. When she finds a too-good-to-be-true rental in a classically Stucco-rendered gated complex, Sarah envisions her life taking on some kind of order; she promises the affable tenants committee that she will do all she can to fit into their order of living.

Her ideal apartment begins to go bump in the night to such a degree she becomes sleep-deprived, allowing doubt over her own powers of perception to creep in. Any deviation from what is accepted by the body corporate draws increasingly disturbing ire (let’s just say pets don’t fare well in these types of movies). Soon, Sarah’s defiance in the face of what the community requires of her spins the film into some chillingly realistic moments of horror.

As recently as one year ago (when Australian audiences first saw the film, then known as 1BR, at its Monster Fest premiere screenings) the key narrative elements were Sarah’s - one woman’s story, basking subtextually in #MeToo empowerment and self-realisation. But viewed again as we bear witness to the death throes of an administration fuelled by cult-like devotion and immoral, self-serving rationalisation, Marmor’s rogue’s gallery of bullying neighbours takes on razor-sharp real-world relevance. 

Willing to maim and torture (and more again) to ensure their collective social goals are met - goals that allude to the sanctimony of imbuing in oneself and those that follow you the moral high-ground - 1BR is as incisive a slice of pitch black social satire as it is a squirm-inducing horror film. Played to perfection by such everyperson character actor types as Naomi Grossman, Clayton Hoff, Giles Matthey and a terrifying Taylor Nichols, the tenants are so grotesquely normal in their appearance yet so vividly vile in the inhumanity of their society. 

The final frames hint that good people like Sarah need to stay alert and be ready to act and react, because gated communities festering with self-interest and privilege are everywhere. With his remarkable debut feature, David Marmor offers you a slice of American pie and rubs your face in it.