Room 203 is the cinematic equivalent of moving into an apartment with “DO NOT RENT, DEFINITELY HAUNTED” energy and then being shocked—shocked—that it’s full of ghosts and bad decisions. On paper, it’s got a decent setup: two best friends, messy pasts, gothic apartment, cursed stained-glass window, Celtic death goddess, and a landlord who’s one monologue away from a true crime podcast. In execution, though, it’s like watching a perfectly okay J-horror idea translated into English, run through a generic-horror filter, and then padded out with Google-level mythology research and therapy-level roommate drama.
The Haunting of Exposition House
Let’s start with the basics: Room 203 is based on a Japanese novel, and you can feel the ghost of a better, weirder story rattling the pipes. The film takes that source material and then buries it under the most over-explained haunting imaginable. Instead of dread, we get Wikipedia.
We’ve got:
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A cursed amulet
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An ancient Celtic goddess of vengeance, Morrigu
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A murder-suicide couple from decades ago
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A pregnant wife, surviving baby, cursed bloodline
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A creepy stained-glass window
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A forbidden basement
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A cursed necklace that chooses victims
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A crow motif
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Dead dates in the walls
It’s like the writers dumped every horror trope and mythological reference into a blender and forgot to ask the important question: Does any of this feel scary, or does it just feel busy?
Spoiler: it feels busy.
Kim and Izzy: Great Setup, Middling Payoff
Kim and Izzy could have been a strong emotional core. Best friends with a tragic rift, a chance at reconciliation, and a fresh start in a too-good-to-be-true gothic apartment? That’s a solid horror foundation.
Kim is the responsible, aspiring journalist with emotionally constipated parents. Izzy is the “troubled” free spirit with a dead mom and a reputation. There’s a built-in tension there—loyalty vs. self-preservation, friendship vs. family. The movie flirts with those themes, then shoves them aside to show you yet another scene of Kim staring at a wall hole like it’s going to solve the plot for her.
Izzy’s decline into sleepwalking, blackouts, and possession is supposed to be tragic. Instead, it plays like a list of horror symptoms being ticked off:
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Sleepwalking? Check.
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Mysterious bruises? Check.
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Bringing home people who then vanish? Check.
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Random outbursts? Check.
At some point, it stops feeling like a character’s downfall and more like someone following a Possession Plot Template™.
The Wall Hole of Obvious Doom
That wall hole. Dear god.
Kim notices a weird hole in her room and thinks, “Let me hang a mirror over that.” The mirror keeps tilting and falling. She hears noises. She sees a crow slither into the wall like it’s auditioning for Silent Hill: Ornithology Edition. Later, she tears open the hole and an actual shriveled corpse-hand drops out wearing the ring of some poor woman who was last seen alive in their apartment.
At no point does anyone say, “You know what, maybe this lease was a mistake.” They just… keep living there. I get that rent is expensive, but once the structural features start bleeding dead people, it’s time to find a studio and some roommates with fewer demonic accessories.
Ronan the Landlord: Red Flag in Human Form
Ronan is introduced with the subtlety of a neon sign that reads: “HI, I AM PART OF THE CURSE.” He gives the girls a tour, sets arbitrary ominous rules:
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Don’t damage the stained glass
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Don’t go in the basement
These are the horror equivalent of “Don’t push this big red button.” Naturally, both rules are broken. Naturally, he spends a lot of time lurking around the apartment like a man who’s absolutely hiding bodies.
When he eventually reveals that he’s the grown-up surviving baby from the murder-suicide backstory, cursed by Morrigu, and managing the goddess’s “sacrifice schedule” through emotionally compromised tenants and an evil necklace, it should be a big reveal. Instead it feels like the movie saying, “Yes, obviously. Moving on.”
Morrigu: Death Goddess by Way of Clip Art
The film tries very hard to make Morrigu—a legitimately interesting Irish mythology figure—into its central boogeyman. Unfortunately, she mostly exists as:
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Crows
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Stained glass designs
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Exposition
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One final “I’m still here!” silhouette at the end
Celtic pagan symbols, dead birds, and angry goddesses can be deeply unsettling when treated with mystery and subtlety. Here, Morrigu is reverse-engineered into the plot like a last-minute theme: “We need a myth. Quick, someone Google ‘vengeful goddess crow death.’”
By the time Ian starts presenting what is essentially his Mythology PowerPoint to Kim, any residual dread has been replaced with the feeling that someone is reading you the lore section of a game manual instead of letting you play.
Ian: Boyfriend, Exposition Machine, Human Shield
Ian starts out promising—a nice guy who gives Kim a campus tour, shares her passion for journalism, and flirts without being a total creep. Then the movie quietly transforms him into:
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Research Monkey
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Sounding Board
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Sacrificial Lamb
He’s there to help Kim look up building history, connect music box names to local murders, and decode Celtic symbols. Just when he’s fully settled into the “supportive horror boyfriend” archetype, he rushes to the apartment and gets killed by possessed Izzy like he’s checking off the “someone important must die” box.
It’s not shocking; it’s just… efficient. Emotionally, his death lands with the weight of a tossed prop.
Tension? Atmosphere? Anyone?
One of the biggest problems with Room 203 is that it mistakes “having stuff happen” for “building tension.” There are jumpy moments—crows, sleepwalking, head-banging, ghosts-in-the-wall vibes—but they rarely escalate in a way that feels suffocating or inevitable.
Instead, the movie cycles through:
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Kim notices something creepy.
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Izzy does something alarming but denies it.
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Ronan lurks.
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Kim and Ian research.
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Repeat.
By the time the real horror hits—body parts in the walls, Izzy fully possessed, Ronan kidnapping Kim—you’re more tired than terrified. It’s like watching a microwave horror: it technically heats up, but the center never quite gets there.
The Ending: Friendship, Blood Loss, and a Crow Budget
The basement showdown with possessed Izzy and doomed Ronan should be gripping. Izzy flickers between her real self and snarling Morrigu-puppet, Ronan gets forced into an unwilling suicide, Kim refuses to kill her friend even while being stabbed. On paper, this is good stuff.
In practice, it’s weirdly underpowered. The emotional stakes feel more assumed than earned. Kim ripping the cursed amulet off Izzy’s neck feels less like a desperate act and more like someone finally removing a broken necklace that’s been annoying them for 90 minutes.
Then we get the final “smash the stained glass” moment, complete with a flock of crows outside like a screensaver that got too excited. Kim and Izzy limping away while the Morrigu appears amid the shattered window should feel like a chilling “it’s not over” coda. Instead it plays like the film shrugging: “Sequel, maybe? Possibly? Please?”
Final Verdict: One Crow Out of Five, and It Flew Into a Wall
Room 203 isn’t offensively bad; it’s just aggressively mediocre in a way that’s almost more frustrating. You can see the outline of the better horror film trapped inside it—one that leans into the claustrophobia of a haunted apartment, the intensity of toxic loyalty, and the strangeness of Celtic death mythology bleeding into modern urban life.
Instead, we get:
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Routine scares
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Over-explained mythology
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A villainous landlord who might as well wear a “Hi, I’m Cursed” badge
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An ancient goddess reduced to set dressing and crow noises
If you’re starving for horror and will watch anything with a haunted room and a cursed accessory, this might pass as background noise. But if you’re hoping for something that sticks with you, Room 203 is the cinematic equivalent of that one apartment you move into, realize is awful, and then spend years pretending never happened.
