There are haunted house movies, and then there’s Sorum—a haunted tenement movie where the ghosts aren’t so much rattling chains as they are rattling off everyone’s childhood traumas. Directed by Yoon Jong-chan in his feature debut, this South Korean dirge masquerading as a horror film proves that sometimes the scariest thing isn’t a poltergeist or a vengeful spirit—it’s being stuck in a crappy apartment with your neighbors oversharing about their lives.
If you thought The Shining was about cabin fever, buckle up. Sorum is what happens when you take the misery of a landlord’s nightmare building, sprinkle in generational trauma, and stir with a rusty screwdriver. The result? A film that’s less a horror story and more a long, slow scream into the void.
The Setup: New Guy in Hell’s Waiting Room
Our protagonist Yong-hyun (Kim Myung-min) is a taxi driver, but don’t expect Taxi Driver. He doesn’t even get De Niro’s monologues. Instead, he moves into Apt. 504 of the Migum Apartments, a building so grimy it looks like it’s been condemned since the Korean War. Immediately, his new neighbors start circling him like trauma vultures.
There’s Mr. Lee (Gi Ju-bong), a divorced writer who can’t sell a novel but can monologue about curses like it’s an Olympic sport. And then there’s Sun-yeong (Jang Jin-young), whose life is a tragic bingo card: abusive husband, dead kid, suffocating loneliness, topped with a neon sign flashing “I’m gonna drag you into my spiral too.”
If this building had a Yelp page, it would just say: “One star. Smells like mildew and regret.”
The Romance (If You Can Call It That)
Hyun and Sun-yeong fall into the kind of relationship that makes you root for celibacy. Their connection is forged over corpse disposal (she kills her husband, he buries him—true romance!) and trauma-bonding so strong it could power a therapy clinic.
They cling to each other like two drunks trying to keep each other upright, except instead of staggering into a cab, they stagger into existential despair. Their sex scenes feel less like passion and more like two ghosts attempting necrophilia.
The Curse, The Backstory, The Blah Blah
Naturally, this is a horror movie, so the building itself comes with a sordid past. Thirty years earlier, a husband murdered his wife, ran off with the mistress, and left his baby to starve in the apartment. Because apparently, no one thought to call Child Services in 1970s Seoul.
This is the movie’s idea of a spooky reveal: “Surprise! Trauma is hereditary.” The baby survived, scarred and cursed, and if you can’t guess who he grew up to be by the halfway point, you probably need your plot-twist license revoked. Spoiler: it’s Hyun. Of course it’s Hyun. He’s been living in a cosmic middle finger from birth.
Supporting Cast of Doom
Every good haunted-apartment flick needs some doomed extras, and Sorum delivers:
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Eun-soo (Jo An): A music teacher who mostly exists to remind Sun-yeong of her dead boyfriend. Because this movie doesn’t believe in joy.
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Mr. Lee: The writer who rants about curses while being beaten to a pulp by Hyun, proving that literary critics aredangerous to writers.
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The Abusive Husband: Briefly alive, mostly useful for domestic-violence flashbacks and corpse disposal duty.
The building itself is arguably the best character: moldy walls, endless corridors, and a basement that screams “rats and despair.” If you squint, it looks like the film set was just an abandoned real estate investment left over from the IMF crisis.
Horror or Depression? Why Not Both!
Here’s the thing about Sorum: it calls itself horror, but the ghosts are less scary than the characters’ bad decisions. The supernatural elements—burning corpses that don’t ignite rooms, babies crying in the walls, faint images of women—are treated with the same urgency as finding a leaky faucet.
The real horror here is watching two miserable people drag each other deeper into misery until the only logical conclusion is strangulation with a muffler. The ghosts don’t need to haunt anyone—the tenants are doing a fine job haunting themselves.
The Big Themes (Because Of Course There Are)
Director Yoon Jong-chan clearly wanted to make a statement about trauma, isolation, and cycles of violence. Unfortunately, it comes across less like The Haunting of Hill House and more like The Haunting of Sad, Broke People.
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Isolation: The characters are all alone even when they’re together. Which is deep, I guess, if you’ve never lived in an apartment where the neighbors never return your borrowed frying pan.
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Trauma: Everyone’s past bubbles up, but instead of therapy, the solution is murder, affairs, and ghost stories.
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Heritage of Pain: Bad news, kids: if your parents screwed up, you’re doomed too. Have fun with that.
It’s not subtle, but it is heavy-handed enough to bruise you.
The Pacing: Molasses in January
At two hours, Sorum moves slower than a ghost with arthritis. Scenes stretch on forever—Hyun staring into the middle distance, Sun-yeong weeping in dim lighting, Mr. Lee mumbling about curses like he’s auditioning for “Drunk Uncle” on SNL.
Every time something happens—murder, affair, revelation—the movie slams the brakes to remind you: “Remember, life is suffering.” By the halfway point, you’re not scared of the ghosts. You’re scared of dying of boredom before the credits roll.
The Ending: Surprise, It’s Still Miserable
Eventually, Hyun strangles Sun-yeong, finds a cursed photo linking him to the building’s original tragedy, beats Mr. Lee within an inch of his life, and then hallucinates a ghost mom singing lullabies.
The movie closes with him crying in the hallway, a broken shell of a man. The audience closes with crying too, because they just spent two hours watching sadness cosplay as horror.
Why This Film is Accidentally Funny
Despite itself, Sorum ends up kind of hilarious. The building is cursed? Sure, but it looks more cursed by poor infrastructure. Hyun’s strangling people with scarves? Okay, but it feels like he’s just tired of monologues. And the ghosts? Half the time they’re just babies crying in the walls—which, if you’ve ever lived in a thin-walled apartment, is less supernatural horror and more Tuesday night.
It’s like someone took a grim arthouse drama, stapled “horror” on the poster, and hoped audiences wouldn’t notice the lack of actual scares.
Final Verdict
Sorum is less a horror film and more a bleak lecture on why you should never sign a lease without inspecting the plumbing. It’s atmospheric, sure, but it confuses “slow burn” with “comatose crawl.” For every genuinely chilling moment, there are ten minutes of characters staring at moldy wallpaper like it holds the secrets of the universe.
But hey—if you love bleak misery, cursed apartments, and couples who make Sid and Nancy look functional, this might be your jam. For the rest of us? It’s a reminder that sometimes the scariest thing in life is a bad rental agreement.
