Movie Review: Apartment 143

Once a year, I devote a blog entry to reviewing a film from the "found footage" genre, a subcategory of horror films that is so new that as recently as my review of The Last Exorcsim just last year, the genre still didn't yet have a standardized name.  Now it does, and one of the latest found footage films is Apartment 143 (originally released in Spain as Emergo), about three family members and three parapsychologists trying to get to the bottom of the family apartment's haunting.

This whole thing started with the indie film The Blair Witch Project (which may not have been the first in the genre, but it was certainly the film to popularize it), and the irony is that this is the one genre in all of filmmaking in which, as the budgets go up, the quality necessarily goes down.  After all, the entire concept depends on convincing you, at least on a "suspension of disbelief" level (since, at this point, we are all too familiar with the idea to actually be convinced) that we are looking at actual raw footage of an event.  That's why at least on one level, whether you like the movie or not, The Blair Witch Project was probably the most effective film of its kind, because regardless of whether you call the movie itself hopelessly idiotic or a work of genius, the true genius was in the marketing, convincing many of its viewers (oh, how naive we were then, America!) that what we were watching actually was found footage.

Of course, now we know better, so we're back to the ol' suspension of disbelief.  In my review of The Last Exorcism last year, I briefly wondered if the filmmakers were starting to lose interest in the idea of actually convincing the audience that the contents were indeed found footage.  With Apartment 143, the issue isn't even a question anymore, as the main cast includes recognizable character actors Kai Lennox (The Unusuals), Michael O'Keefe (Caddyshack, The West Wing), and Rick Gonzalez (Boston Public, War of the Worlds).  At the risk of mentioning the obvious, I have to point out that casting recognizable actors in a film of this sort completely misses and ruins the point of the genre, which (also at the risk of repeating myself) depends on, even if actually convincing us is no longer possible, at least the illusion that the events of the movie genuinely happened to ordinary people and happened to be caught on film.  As found footage movies become less and less indie and more and more Hollywood, I can't help but wonder how long it is before makers of this type of movie completely abandon any effort at all, and we are subjected to a movie in which the allegedly genuine found footage is of two "regular guys" in a haunted house, and the two guys are played by Russell Crowe and Tom Cruise.  But that's just speculation on my part, and hopefully things will never get quite that bad.

Anyway, the preaching aside, let's at least address what little plot there is.  Of course (and this isn't a complaint about haunted house movies, just an observation) a movie of this type doesn't really require much of a plot; all the producers really need to say to the actors and special effects people is "six people in a haunted apartment, go!" and you gotcher self a movie.  But screenwriter Rodrigo Cortes deserves a kudo or two for at least trying to inject some back story into the proceedings, as the father played by Lennox is recently widowed, and for (eventually mundane) reasons that aren't spoken aloud until the film is almost over, the daughter blames the father for the mother's death.

There are two ways of looking at this back story:  One could argue that it adds an extra layer to the events unfolding on the screen, and I guess that was the writer's intention, but frankly, you could have edited out the entire monologue about how the wife died, and you really wouldn't have changed anything significant.  In fact, to me, the only real point of the revelatory monologue isn't narrative, but rather to give Lennox a chance to show his acting chops.

But someone really should have told the filmmakers that that's the wrong, wrong, wrong attitude behind this kind of movie!  If a found footage film is to work at all, it's precisely by foregoing the recognizable actors and Oscar ploy moments -- and Lennox's monologue about the circumstances behind his wife's death is the perfect example of why.  He kinda works in this film when he's presented as just a regular guy (that's the point, that's the point!) but the movie loses all hope when he gets on camera and acts his heart out, as if he's a theater student auditioning for a Method instructor.  It's all over the top, in a genre in which "over the top" just kills the mood.

Yet Michael O'Keefe, as the lead parapsychologist, errs too far in the opposite direction, since whereas Lennox is, at one point, too emotional for the film to work, O'Keefe's character oddly seems to lack any emotion at all.  At first, this seemed like a legitimate aspect of his character, and I accepted his lack of emotion, because the character is in the apartment in a professional capacity as a parapsychologist, and I figured he just prides himself on his emotional detachment from potentially terrifying circumstances.  But as things get crazier and crazier, and he just stares with a blank look on his face, I increasingly got the feeling that O'Keefe's unemotionality had nothing to do with the character itself, and had everything to do with an unwise "actor's choice," as if O'Keefe -- or perhaps director Carles Torrens -- decided that "what this movie really needs is understatement."  Yes, that's the perfect way to describe O'Keefe's performance:  It's too understated.  Not that I'm trying to be clever here, but it would be an understatement to say that O'Keefe's performance is understated.

Minor spoiler alert:  I want to very briefly discuss one of the last lines in the movie.  If you've read this far and still intend to see the movie (although by now it's clear I'm not recommending it) maybe you wanna skip this paragraph.  But in the interest of completionism, this moment in the movie has to be addressed:  After things have gone all to hell (and in haunted house movies, they all eventually do go nuts, you need a pay-off after all the build-up) and then calmed down again, there's a quiet moment at the end when the parapsychologists are casually chatting while putting their equipment away.  The Ricky Gonzalez character, commenting on the chaos that had happened before, states it was a "very interesting" day.

"Most unusual," O'Keefe agrees (with zero emotion of course).  "The most unusual day of my life -- with one or two possible exceptions."

I sort of liked this line and sort of didn't.  On the plus side, it combines a hint of humor with a hint of history, shining some light onto why he had such little reaction to all the chaos that was happening around him, as he's apparently an old pro who feels he's seen it all before.  On the other hand, the purpose of the line is just too transparent, as we're too clearly supposed to think, "wow, if he's had days more unusual than this, I wonder what those other days were like!"  Maybe it's even a (though I shudder to think it) set up for potential prequels involving the same character.  The point is that the line, although it's a good one, is too plainly a writer's line, not a character's line.  It's the writer trying to be clever, not something the character would say.

With transparently written lines like this, recognizable actors in the cast, and too-streamlined editing, the makers of Apartment 143 haven't made a bad movie, exactly (since if you want a couple of cheap scares, the movie delivers) but the end result is just as dissatisfying, as the filmmakers have illustrated that they clearly don't understand what it takes to make a movie of this type in the first place.  Perhaps they shouldn't have tried at all.