Tenants review

By Simon Thompson

Anthology movies are a tricky thing to get right, when executed properly it results in masterpieces such as Black Sabbath and Creepshow, but when done poorly, however, you end up with Four Rooms. Given the task of categorising writers Sean Mesler, Mary O’Neil, and Buz Wallick’s Tenants I would say that its quality lies somewhere in the middle, which, but for a select few exceptions, is roughly where a lot of anthology horror ends up, because it’s a sub-genre where it’s rare that every single segment comes together. 

The plot of Tenants follows Joni ( Mary O’Neil) who, after waking up in a mysterious apartment complex, desperately tries to find her sister Emily (Katheryne Isabelle Easton). It quickly dawns on Joni that, in a seven-storey apartment building, this is task that is far easier said than it is done as she traverses floor after floor, interacting with the building’s various tenants- all of whom have horrors of their own to deal with. 

When you take into account that this movie had a crew of six people and a thirteen-day production schedule, what it achieves, for the most part, is extremely impressive. Tenants has a strong sense of tone and atmosphere with the Silent Hill 3 style apartment building being a fantastic setting for the action. The problem that it has is that some of the various residents stories are more interesting than others. 

The stories Hoarder and Acting Rash are the two that I’m going to single out for special praise, because they are neat short-form pieces of horror that do their job properly. Hoarder centres around a grieving widower       (Myles Cranford) and his son ( Acquah Dansoh), who is trying to convince him to clear out his apartment in the wake of his wife’s death and to try and rebuild his life. In this short segment both actors go from relaxed to argumentative- and every step in between- beautifully, with both Cranford and Danson being completely believable in their roles as a father and son opposed to one another. 

Acting Rash, a story about a former child actress (Christa Collins), now a washed up has been, whose agent, through a piece of fortuitous good luck secures her a gig that might revitalise her career subject to having a meeting at short notice. All is going well until she develops a huge rash on her face out of the blue, scrambling around her apartment to find some sort of remedy for it. 

This short works because it’s both a funny meditation on the concepts of fame and stardom (as well as the make-up and beauty industries) mixed with Cronenbergian body horror and a strong central performance by Christa Collins, who embodies the tragicomic nature of being a has-been child star to a t. 

These segments are very much Tenants’s A material, as the central plot involving Joni that connects all the stories sadly didn’t quite come together as I would have liked it to, and the rest of the segments left me feeling pretty flat. 

To conclude, there is a lot to like about Tenants, and, given its production and budgetary constraints the end result is still an assured, imaginative, and competent piece of filmmaking. Even though the vast majority of the stories in the anthology don’t quite measure up to Acting Rash and Hoarder, you can still see the sheer amount of effort and passion put into the movie, something you’d have to be a stonehearted monster not to praise.