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It has been stated time and time again that a well-executed genre movie may be able to present a provocative, yet necessary view on recent developments within our world. While it is perhaps the most obvious choice to use the elements of drama, especially with a family at its center, to tell a story dealing with these themes, the same can be said for horror and science-fiction. Some of the most relevant and also timeless stories have utilized aspects of horror and dreams to create a vision which still resonates with audiences today. Director Yoon Eun-kyung (“Hotel Lake”) seems to share this view considering her latest feature “The Tenants” blends elements of both genres, resulting in a Kafkaesque tale about the human condition, especially the value of the individual within a system seeking to control and observe everything.

The Tenants is screening at Black Movie

For most of his adult life,...

Eun-Kyung Yoon's The Tenants reflects South Korean hardships that are universally traumatic. It's fringe horror, nodding to existential absurdism and black-and-white interpretations of Kafkaesque illusions, but terrifying nonetheless. Yoon examines the drab reality of middle-class workers who only exist to uphold any city's ecosystem: corrupt capitalism built on the backs of its forgotten contributors. Storytelling doesn't lack eerie imagery of crawlspace dwellers or sleep paralysis encounters, yet Yoon avoids traditional genre formulas. Don't expect the shared-space suspense of Two Pigeons or the cuckoo slasher violence of Dream Home — The Tenants plays more like artisan science fiction with slinking discomfort.

Shin-dong (Kim Dae-geon) is your typical slave to the grind. He crunches corporate numbers for Happy Meat, an artificial meat company that barely pays him enough to afford rent. That won't matter much longer because Shin-dong's child-aged landlord giddily reveals that his struggling tenant will soon be homeless due to building renovations.

If you think the housing crisis is bad in the UK and US, you should check out Seoul, where 6% of households are unable to find accommodation at all and others are paying through the nose for tiny jjokbangs, or ‘piece rooms’ – illegal partitions within other people’s homes or business premises, often with no cooking facilities or basic sanitation. Several films have already been made about this, from Jeon Go-woon’s coruscating drama Microhabitat to Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning black comedy Parasite. Yoon Eun-kyung’s début work, which screened as part of Fantaspoa 2024, is something a little more out of left field.

Set at an unspecified point in the future, when people are living in city domes but the air quality is still terrible, it focuses on Shin-dong (Kim Dae-geon), a lowly office worker who has devoted most of his life to serving a company which produces artificial...