Apartment

Apartment otherwise known as APT or 9:56, is a South Korean horror film that was released in 2006 and is based off of a comic.

Plot

Se-jin (played by Ko So-young) is a department store employee who lives a rather lonely life. She moves into a gorgeous, high-raised apartment building when she begins to experience a strange phenomenon working around her life.

One day, she realizes as the clock strikes 9:56, that the lights in the apartment building across from her mysteriously begin to click off simultaneously before a death occurs. As she slowly begins to tie previous hauntings that occur in her apartment to the ones around the neighborhood, a dark secret soon begins to reveal itself and unfortunately for Se-jin, she finds herself stuck in the middle of it all.

Overall

This is my first Korean horror movie that I've come to see and for a horror movie, the concept is rather intriguing. Se-jin's character and personality was something I could relate to, seeing to it that she leads a loner type of lifestyle and rarely has friends that she goes out with. Her whole being consisted of going to work and coming back home.

Though it was confusing at first to catch up with a string of events, the hauntings that she begins to face is after a metro accident in which she was nearly involved in a murder-suicide.

Coming home from work one day, being the only person in the subway due to late night shifts, Se-jin feels as if she's being stalked. Her heels tapping upon the tile flooring continue to ring through the atmosphere before a new set of footsteps add onto her paranoia.

Of course, as she's patiently waiting for the train to arrive, she turns to see a gorgeous young woman smoking a cigarette and crying while listening to her iPod. The woman tries to confide in Se-jin, speaking to her of how horrible life is and what not. Obviously, Se-jin tries to keep to herself when the woman begins to quote parts of her life that no one else seems to know.

As Se-jin's train is approaching, the woman tries to jump onto the tracks while pulling Se-jin down with her, saying how horrible it would be to die the way one like her lives, alone. Se-jin, as panicked as she is, pushes the woman off of her and onto the tracks before she is brutally killed.

After the death of this woman, Se-jin is bombarded with this feeling of dread before all these mystery's begin to happen at exactly 9:56. While she continuously seems to be haunted by this woman who continues to be nameless every night, Se-jin finds comfort in another young girl who has been confined to a wheelchair for nearly all her life, Yu-jeon (played by Jang Hee-jin).

While these hauntings start to take a toll on Se-jin's health, forcing her to become a bit too into the investigation, she soon finds out that after she was involved with the death of the woman at the subway that she was able to see ghosts and surely enough, cooperate with them. One of them, being Yu-jeon who is a spirit confined to her apartment after committing suicide.

Overall, this movie was well played and like I said, as confusing as it started out to be, the pieces all came together and made it a wonderful horror with a twist at the end that I simply couldn't get over.