1BR Review (Film, 2020)
content warning: animal abuse, torture, violence against women, mental wellness, physician-assisted dying
Sarah moves into an idyllic apartment complex in Los Angeles. The goal of the building is for the apartment to be a caring neighborhood. Everyone looks after everyone else. That also means everyone very quickly learns each other business. If Sarah has a problem, everyone else has a solution.
1BR is apartment complex Gothic. This is the natural modern extension of the traditional Gothic. Instead of a sprawling mansion with hidden doors, the setting is a home separated from the larger house, able to hear everything that happens but never truly know what’s going on. Your neighbors can be the nicest people in the world and you’ll never know all their secrets.
1BR reminds me of Sarah Langan’s approach to the modern Gothic. The world is filled with instantly recognizable characters that spiral out to grotesque caricatures of what you thought they originally represented. Everything collides at an early moment of chaos, forever changing the course of the story.
The earliest example is the character of Miss Stanhope. She’s an older woman living at the apartments who isn’t quite stable on her feet anymore. Sarah helps her to a chair when she first visits the apartment complex for an open house. Everyone helps Miss Stanhope out. Sarah befriends her, finding out she used to be a Hollywood actress. Then she finds out that Miss Stanhope hasn’t been taking her medication and has a very different perspective on the people who live in their complex.
The twist going into the second act leads the film into torture territory. While Sarah’s character moves to LA to leave an abusive situation and define her own life, she loses control of everything once she moves into the apartment complex. She just doesn’t know why it’s happening. The methods of the film are modern post-Saw horror, but the mechanics are pure literary Gothic. A young woman gets a house and is forced to confront the deep secrets hidden in the walls.
1BR is an effective horror film. It’s not driven by jump scares. It has strong characters, a great structure, and justification for what happens throughout.
My issue with 1BR is the approach to mental wellness. The motivation of all the twists and turns is an anti-medication treatment to any problem you could face in life. Prescription medication for depression is treated the same as alcoholism by the villains. While this is the motivation of the villains, there is nothing in the film to suggest how Sarah was treating her depression before was effective. Her world is even coded as showing significant improvements once she gets through the first phase of the treatment.
This is dangerous territory to hinge a horror film on. Writer/director David Marmor does find a clear voice in 1BR. The film does not cross over into exploitation. If anything, it’s playing with the same territory as Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, or Robert Eggers’ The Witch. An outsider is forced to comply with a doctrine they don’t totally understand but want to believe in. They want to believe in what they’re being presented, but what they’re being presented is a version of reality completely at odds with everything they’ve ever believed or known about the world.
1BR is not an easy film to watch. It is deeply philosophical, psychological horror layered on top of Gothic tropes. The beautiful, modern apartment complex with the loving community replaces the darkened corridors and sprawling gardens of the traditional Gothic. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the world. It is the people and the community itself that create the terror.
1BR is currently streaming on Netflix.
