The conventions of the standard Gothic haunted-house tale are downsized to a suburban apartment building in this modest outing by writer-director Stanley Yung – a film which owes a creative debt to Asian horror cinema of the early-to-mid-2000s, where sleek high-rise flats and cramped, crumbling tenement buildings alike hosted a castle’s worth of ghosts, demons, curses and other malevolent phenomena. 2 Bedroom 1 Bath taps into that subgenre, blending it with intimate psychological twists for the tale of a struggling young married couple (Michelle Hicks & Andrew Walker) whose quaint new apartment hides a disturbingly violent past. The pair’s simmering relationship issues, including the wife’s increasingly unbalanced mental state and their futile attempts to conceive a child, are magnified by increasingly creepy events linked to the former occupants – one of whom allegedly disappeared after drowning several children in the bathtub – and it seems just about everyone in the building has a dark secret of their own.
Despite a flat, made-for-TV feel to much of the production, there’s still a fair helping of atmosphere at work here, aided by a desaturated color scheme and claustrophobic interiors (nearly the entire film plays out within the confines of the apartment), while smoke machines lend a dusty haze to the aging rooms and corridors. The subtle building of tension in the first half is admirable, but there’s a noticeable lack of intensity behind the paranormal shocks when they finally arrive, derailing the scares just as the film seems to have found its momentum. The bland musical score doesn’t help either, as it drains all the energy out of some potentially jump-inducing scenes – including a Grudge-inspired dream sequence and a clever twist on the old “bathroom mirror” gag. It also doesn’t help that many of the ghostly appearances are delivered in a cold, matter-of-fact way, even extending to the characters’ weirdly low-key reactions to otherwise horrific apparitions.
Hicks and Walker turn in decent performances – although the husband, a newly-hired college professor, comes off as pretty unsympathetic. A subplot involving a flirtatious goth student and an oddball scene of the prof finding the same girl on an amateur porn site (while he’s writing an essay on Sylvia Plath, no less) suggests that Yung is trying to weave in an additional layer of psycho-sexual conflict, while the couple’s more realistic grief at multiple miscarriages and growing emotional instability is where the story’s heart should be. When we learn the couple are finally able to conceive a child, the plot suddenly takes an explicable left turn into Rosemary’s Baby territory with the unexplained second-act arrival of an annoying new-age midwife with a vaguely mysterious agenda. Why it goes this route is never fully explained… at least not to my satisfaction. The climactic twist, while it may have seemed fairly shocking on paper, ultimately comes across as rushed, clumsy and confusing.
On the plus side, the production benefits from several brief but solid cameos from welcome genre icons – including Eric Roberts (The Dark Knight) in a rare sensitive role a fatherly obstetrician, Dee Wallace (The Howling, E.T.) as the couple’s disarmingly sweet landlady who takes in wayward children, and Costas Mandylor (Saw IV-VI) as a strangely belligerent neighbor – but in the end, as the central characters’ plight became less involving, I found myself wishing for them to return as more integral players.
The film’s central concept – a building so haunted by a tragic event that it dooms all who enter it to relive the horror again and again – is truly a classic setup, and has produced some of the greatest stories in the genre, dating back to legendary literary works like Henry James’ gothic novel The Turn of the Screw. It’s still a fertile field for spooky storytelling, and 2 Bedroom 1 Bath does find some new modern suburban twists in the tale, but it doesn’t till deep enough into that ground to produce anything you haven’t seen done better – and scarier – many times before.
