Marco (Nicholas Saenz) and his girlfriend, Dana (Brea Grant) are expecting a baby. However, there’s pressure mounting on Marco because he’s unemployed and the clock is ticking so that he can provide for his new family before his girlfriend gives birth or dumps him. Then one day while he’s doing anything but applying for jobs, he gets a text on an old Nokia telling him that his girlfriend is lying to him.
He answers the text, but doesn’t get a response although the damage has already been done and Marco starts to suspect that his girlfriend will leave him, is cheating on him and maybe that their baby isn’t his.
He tries to shake it off, but the feelings of rejection from employees and all the time he’s spending alone are starting to get to him and he feels like he’s losing his mind. Not to mention the times he spends talking to people who aren’t there.
Apartment 413 is a psychological thriller set in a single apartment. The premise is solid because almost everybody has gotten to that point where they can’t find a job and it feels like it may never happen. Thoughts start coming into your head and the anxiety of having no purpose in life can feel stressful.
However, Apartment 413 doesn’t seem to have any idea about what it wants to say and what direction it wants to take Marco’s story.
There are many psychological and horror thrillers which deal with mental health and not usually in a healthy way. There are twists such as ‘he was the killer all along’ or ‘there was a conspiracy to drive her mad’, but neither of those seem satisfying. They’re also usually tagged on to the end to make films seem cleverer than they really are. In the case of Apartment 413 though, there’s a bit of ambiguity and although a mystery can be good fun to try and solve, it comes across as if the filmmakers haven’t made their minds up themselves.
There’s a fair bit of mundanity in this 80-minute film and although that does reflect the time where somebody may be unemployed, there’s an uneven balance between this and the scenes of suspense and mystery. What could have been a deep insight into the psyche of somebody trying to find a job and slowly losing hope or a supernatural thriller with an interesting twist just feels confusing and unfinished.
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