Occupant (2011) Reviews

• Weird atmosphere building up to absolute nothingness

  dschmeding2012-01-02

  OK, considering the plot about a guy who has to live 12 days in the flat of his recently deceased grandmother to be the legal tenant with a nice low rent in NYC no one would expect much. Sounds like a Scooby-Doo Movie with kids who have to sleep a night in a spooky house to win a bet. So my expectations weren't high and I have to admit the first 40 Minutes had me positively surprised because the location and weird atmosphere keep you interested. So in the beginning you take the whole strangeness of that guy in his huge flat, isolated with only a strange Doorman helping him get his groceries as weird foreshadowings of eerie things unfolding. People appear in the flat, others disappear, there is a strange hole in the wall and the main character gets more and more paranoid regularly stamped with "Day X" on screen to count the 12 days and announcing some terrifying finale. So I give to the creators of the movie that they managed to create atmosphere with minimalism but that just falls apart after 40 Minutes because then the strange incidents get tedious and don't follow any build up. Many things don't make sense and are never explained until the guy suddenly (really pretty much out of the blue to me) snaps and delivers one bloody scene towards the end that follows the whole strangeness of the previous minutes perfectly but is totally incoherent and random... and cheap considering a 12 day build up and then having a guy snap some hours before his lawyer knocks at the door. Spoiler alert.... If you go for the psychotic episode/its all just in your head motive don't drop red herrings all over the place that have no meaning whatsoever. After all the basic premise of granny dying with a horrified look on her face makes which is the base for everything here.... it makes no sense unless the whole family is genetically pre-disposed to schizophrenia. So watch the first 40 Minutes, enjoy the weird atmosphere and then roll the dice to decide if its a Paranoid Psycho or Haunted House Movie. No matter what ... this movie is totally random and the character development is ridiculous. There really are people randomly falling from the sky or appearing in the apartment dying of a heart-attack. When the credits roll you can't but feel cheated.

• Predictable and slow

  descartesrock2011-11-13

  Not recommended. This movie was slow and predictable. If you've seen the Shinning, then you have basically seen this movie. The acting was well done and there were some cool shots, but the actual plot is one that is constantly overdone. It never made me cringe and I rolled my eyes at the complete utter predictability of it. It's a waste of time. Really, it is. I have never looked at the clock so much during the movie, wondering when it was going to end. And also, I am not a person that is usually good at predicting things, but this movie was so easy to predict. The other thing is, I didn't really like the main character, due to the way he was presented in the beginning, so the fact was that I didn't care at all as to what was going to happen to him made the movie even more boring. It was a well reviewed film by other users, which gave me the idea that it was original and well done. IT ISN'T.

• Godawful!

  doorsscorpywag2012-01-01

  I watched this drivel on the strength of some of the reviews which I now see are obviously written by the crew/cast/director. Don't believe a word of the 10 star reviews as this film is utterly awful. It makes me laugh when I see the videos of rubbish like this and how glowing the cherry picked reviews are. But in reality they are poorly scripted, badly acted toss. The only part I enjoyed was the part with the door which I found rather amusing. This film is not like the Shining or Polanski it's just another worthless waste of film and peoples time. Not the worst film ever as there are better candidates for that here but one which is not worth 90 minutes of your time. Time better spent grouting the bathroom or lying on your back looking at the ceiling. Believe me both these activities will feel more rewarding than watching this pile of crap.

• It definitely leaves you with one too many questions.

  MissCookieMonstaaa2013-09-01

  I will start without spoiling anything and speak in general. I just finished watching this and I'm not exactly sure how I feel about it. I do think it had so much potential but didn't quite execute it all right. I agree with many of the previous reviews. I completely understand why its getting mixed and mostly negative reviews. I would only suggest this to someone who has time to kill and likes this particular type of movie. I mean the kind that keeps you guessing but doesn't really explain much so you're left guessing. I personally found myself getting kind of bored in the last thirty minutes and I was wondering what is going to happen. I was just waiting for something to happen already... and not much happened. At the same time, I personally thought it had some good things about it as well. Such as the apartment itself, I thought it was beautiful and at the same time so easily eery all on its own. There were one or two moments that were really interesting, not necessarily scary. I think you'll either like it or hate it, depending on what you like in a movie its worth a try. My main problem and thing I want to point out is it leaves you with one too many questions. There are some specific things I wanted to point out that I liked and disliked about this movie. Maybe it will give others another perspective if they, like me, came here after watching it to get a better understanding and/or see what other people thought. *SPOILERS BELOW, STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS* It had its good moments (to me). For example the mirror scene... what was that about. The silhouette before blog girl died, I didn't think it looked like our main character so it did freak me out for a minute... things like that. I just think it wasn't all bad. I didn't care for what happened to the cat (exterminator spraying it, then baked). I don't understand the hole in the wall. I don't understand the door man's MO... and a lot more I just didn't understand. I guess I'll end this review with my personal interpretation of this whole ting. For some reason being in that big apartment for so many days caused him to lose it. Maybe it was the pressure of losing the place. Maybe he was already to some degree crazy. Maybe it was a mixture of things that built up to our disappointing end with an impractical suicide. At the end we see the little boy watching the full clip from blog girls camera. We know that Danny also watched this, so maybe he couldn't come to terms with seeing himself kill her and then hide it. I thought maybe that's why the camera is found on the floor later, kind of smashed up. I still don't understand the hole in the wall, or if it was just a natural heart attack causing the grandmothers death, but I'm getting that this was mostly his insanity. Maybe the stapled wallpaper over the wall was ripped because he threw blog girl down there after killing her. Maybe later he tried to stuff exterminator guy down there but he wouldn't fit or was too heavy. I understand in this insanity (by his words) he rationalized by saying cops and such would come to the apartment if they knew about the exterminator dying. Then he worried about being kicked out of there so he felt he had to hide it. Maybe seeing his cat in the oven really pushed him off the edge. At first I thought he put the door up as a trap as he did with all of the wire and crap. Then he looks around and remembers what was and decides to kill himself. So I'm just not sure... as I said it leaves you with too many questions.

• Above average Polanski-like homage, but Hansis isn't really up to the task

  bob_meg2011-10-24

  "Occupant" has one of the nicest, most believable set-ups of any recent urban thriller: Danny (Van Hansis) moves into his granny's (whom he's never met) rent-controlled Manhatten apartment (if you can call a 3500 sq ft space merely that) hoping to continue her $675 a month renting price, with the aide of an overly-friendly/sinister doorman (Thorston Kaye). The only glitch? To secure the place at the low-low figure, he only needs to barricade himself inside the plush joint long enough to lawyer up and win legal custody of the property. Of course, this isn't as easy as it seems, as a series of eerie coincidences gradually convince Danny that someone's not exactly playing above board in their attempts to foist him out. Henry Miller's latest film is much glossier than his previous outings, nicely shot, with some inventive camera angles. The story, by writer/producer Johnathan Brett, is engaging, if not rendered a bit campy sometimes with it's use of 250-point Helvetica fonts screaming DAY ONE, DAY TWO, etc. The real weakness, I think, is the casting of Van Hansis --- a soap opera actor who looks a bit too Abercrombie to be mistaken for the average working-joe-farm-boy-come-to-the-big-city. He's not bad, really, his acting is just very one-note (as with many soap opera alumni, his range is either in the "super sincere" or "utterly hysterical" registers...they're either whispering or shouting). Unfortunately, he doesn't do well with the latter. It appears Miller found that out, because the film tends to lapse into gimmicks like speed-frame, freeze-frame, and wipes particularly in the final scenes. It takes a lot of gravitas to pull off the kind of gut wrenching panic that's needed here, and Hansis just doesn't have it. This is a shame, because the film, overall, has a lot of unique touches going for it. It just needs an actor with a resume that's longer than his Facebook page to support it.