Mark Reviews Movies: ROOM 203

Room 203, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 14, 2022

Don't stick your hand in the weird, wet hole in the wall. Don't gift or wear a mysterious locket that you find in said hole. Don't ignore the smell of death in an apartment or try to cover it up with a single stick of incense. Those are some of the seemingly obvious things—all of which one would think don't need to be told—that the characters in Room 203 do. Whether or not those characters are doomed on account of performing such dumb actions is irrelevant. As for the movie, it's definitely doomed, although only in part because of them.

The rest of the downfall of co-writer/director Ben Jagger's adaptation of Nanami Kamon's novel is how routine and predictable the whole affair is. The story revolves around best friends Kim (Francesca Xuereb), an incoming journalism student, and Izzy (Viktoria Vinyaraska), an aspiring actor. They move into a cheap apartment in the city together to accomplish their dreams.

If the creepy landlord (played by Scott Gremillion) isn't enough warning that they should get a refund on their security deposit, the eerie stained glass window, depicting a grisly Medieval battle, and the aforementioned hole, which refuses to be covered, probably should have done the trick. When Izzy finds a necklace inside said hole, she starts wearing it, for reasons that even fellow journalism student Ian (Eric Wiegand) finds impossible to rationalize. From a prologue, we know that the necklace has the power to possess the wearer, when a guy trying to fill the hole finds the necklace and gives it to his immediately doomed girlfriend.

There's a reason all of the haunting things, such as Izzy's possession and the hole getting larger and wetter, and killings start to take place within the apartment. When the screenplay (written by Jagger, John Poliquin, and Nick Richey) isn't loading up cheap scares in the overly dark apartment (meaning it's difficult to see or care about who or what might be in the space), it sends Kim and Ian on an exposition hunt of news articles to uncover just how many people ended up dead or missing in connection to the place.

That's still not enough to convince Kim to think of staying elsewhere. Then again, neither is the stench of at least one rotting corpse that we know is in the apartment—but that disappears and re-appears, depending on whether or not another potential victim has to be in there.

Other issues, such as the fact that not a single performance is convincing, seem unnecessary to mention or mean to describe further. Room 203 is just a repetitive, formulaic, and nearly broken bore.

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