As Cambodia crawls out of its movie-making infancy and starts to produce content outside the country's borders, it's chosen to do so with the mindset of appealing to a more Western audience than what would initially be expected. Graced with spectacular visuals, a highly engaging technical skillset belying its brief existence, and a wholly unexpected mindset that's quite immersive into the experience, co-writer/directors Sokyou Chea and Inrasothythep Neth provide one of the more impressive and outwardly enjoyable introductions to Cambodian genre cinema with their newest effort “Tenement” screening at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Tenement is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam
Following her mother's death, Soriya (Thanet Thorn), a Japanese-Cambodian manga artist, decides to travel to Cambodia along with her boyfriend Daichi (Yoshihiko Hosoda), to find out more about the country her mother fled. Soriya reunites with her lost family Aunt Mao (Sveng Socheata) and moves into the apartment where her mother used to live. As she tries to discover more about her past, she's confronted by strange events within the building that hint at something darker with the residents. What at first appears as over-caring considerations from the community towards the newcomers soon turns out to be part of a ritual. The residents are preparing a new host for the building's evil spirit before it starts killing them once again and forces her to stop it before it spreads.
On the whole, “Tenement” has quite a lot to like. One of the stronger features is a truly enjoyable and immersive setup from Chea and Neth that features a lot of interconnecting parts. Starting with the background of Soriya's mother dying in mysterious circumstances while living in the community that she's long since been estranged from, this provides the means of establishing the motive to return as well as giving enough of their background with each other. Since we're aware of the relationship presented and how that affects her, the desire to reconnect with everyone once she arrives to figure out the cause is a natural part of their reunion. It also makes the presence of the community's behavior and rituals seem like the perfect choice to enhance this type of story by appearing as quaint customs before gradually appearing darker and more ominous. That brings about a fantastic sense of looming dread the longer Soriya and Daichi stay around Mao and the community with the increasing danger leading to more thrills.
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This setup helps “Tenement” become far more fun once the ominous instincts start coming to fruition. With the low-key nature revolving around the community's good-natured if slightly off-kilter behavior or just Soriya noticing ritualistic decorations left behind, this is nice enough to serve the film until it gets to the more overt sequences later on, once she's left alone in the apartment. The big sequence plays as a form of bizarre meal-prep with the gathered family members and others she's met in the community performing what appears to be a ritualistic ceremony designed to prepare her for a special occult ritual that soon turns into a nightmarish fever dream that she can't tell her dream from reality, is quite impressive. It starts the remaining part of this one into a much darker genre effort that includes several reveals about the visions she's been experiencing. It all leads to the wild finale where the dark origins of the ceremony are revealed as it's all about bringing the new spirit into a host's body which is again more low-key than expected but still manages some generally chilling visuals and chases around the complex.
There aren't too many drawbacks present in “Tenement” but several issues do crop up. Among the main factors is the sense of confusion present here since very little is explained. As the first half is much more ominous and low-key than anything, there's not much in the way of revealing what's going on, preferring to remain focused on the haunting atmosphere of the building as well as their ominous behavior to generate the scares almost exclusively. As a result, hardly anything gets revealed about what the community is trying to do, what their ritual entails, or how everything is supposed to be carried out. It's not until the end that anything comes together so there's a chance for this to be somewhat confusing at the start to get into what's going on. The other detriment is that this setup allows for a rather slow-going first half as well and very little happens beyond setting up the storylines which are paid off in the ending, so this takes a while to get its point out.
Featuring quite a lot to like and only a few minor drawbacks, “Tenement” comes off rather well as Cambodia tries to put their foot forward into international genre cinema with a solid feature. Those who are appreciative of this kind of filmmaking or curious about its origins will have a lot to like here.
