Apartment 1BR
blue finch films
David Marmor’s Apartment 1BR (also known as 1BR) perfectly reflects the promise of Los Angeles: an idyllic, and often dangerous land of ambition and self-reliance that allows anyone to reinvent themselves. In this way the film is both self-aware and hilariously unaware of how its Los Angeles-themed cautionary tale is informed by how the film is presented. In its low budget aesthetic the film approaches a level of claustrophobic small-scale terror, but quickly reveals an emptiness that robs the film of most of its narrative value.
1BR follows Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom), an aspiring fashion designer who moves to Los Angeles to escape her traumatic past and start anew. After securing the apartment of her dreams she soon finds that her neighbours are not what they seem and that the concept of “community” comes at a deadly cost. It is a simple premise and one that allows the story to unfold at a swift pace, with twists and turns that might be somewhat predictable, but are still surprisingly effective.
The secret weapon of this film comes from its largely unrecognizable cast, which deliberately deprives the viewer of something to latch onto and contributes to the disorienting atmosphere of the story. Bloom is quiet and understated here and her performance adds dimension and depth to a character that might otherwise feel like a static horror film protagonist. Her character undergoes something like a meaningful character arc, but the film obfuscates the journey along the way. As a result, Bloom is doing most of the heavy lifting in making her character feel like a real person.
The story understands the concept of set-up and payoff and satisfyingly delivers most of these elements without much in the way of surprise or intrigue. Throughout the film’s tight runtime, the experience feels more like a countdown to inevitable payoffs. To give it credit, it is worth noting that there is beauty to be found in simplicity. Marmor utilizes its simple premise and story beats to achieve something streamlined and focused. In this way the experience is often gripping and terrifying in all the ways that it should be.
The film’s low budget does hurt the experience somewhat. It turns what could be a truly immersive and unsettling experience into something that falls just short of the heights it wishes to reach. As well it presents a thinly veiled critique of the isolating power of Los Angeles and its self-absorbed inhabitants but does not flesh this out through the plot’s progression. Because of this the actual meaning of the film is unclear. However, the film remains consistent with both tone and pacing and perfectly entangles the viewers in its inherently shocking premise.
From an aesthetic point of view, this film uses its low-budget feel to truly capture the sense of suburban terror that Marmor consistently invokes. Though the film cannot escape the limitations that come with this small budget, it makes the most of its unique ideas and characters to build an appropriately insane little world. Apartment 1BR is a contained thriller with disturbing implications and lofty ambitions, that succeeds in its simplicity but stumbles in its thematic development.
