Not to be confused with the found-footage spooker Apartment 143 — dyslexia excepted — Apartment 413 is almost entirely a two-hander in one location. Yes, of course it’s the unit of the title: a depressing-looking place in a depressing-looking complex in Austin, with a fitting “FML” carved into the window AC unit’s exterior side.
Community college dropout Marco Reyes (Nicholas Saenz, Mr. Roosevelt) needs a job. And fast, because his girlfriend, Dana (Brea Grant, All the Creatures Were Stirring), is about-to-pop pregnant. He’s not having much luck, considering his alarm mysteriously fails to wake him as set, thus causing missed interviews.
As he sits in his apartment all day applying for jobs — and playing video games — stranger things begin happening: Trash re-appears; an unknown text message suggests it’s “not your baby”; and Post-it Notes pop up like magic, scrawled with threats like “THIS IS A WARNING.”
Things escalate from there. Stress? Black mold? Psychotic break? Residual haunting from the site’s domestic murder two years prior?
You’ll find out, although the ending is more confounding than disturbing. As the first film for both director Matt Patterson and writer Ron Maede, Apartment 413 likely serves as a calling card for bigger and better things, rather than a Texas-sized reworking of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion through a millennial-hipster lens. At just under 80 minutes, credits included, not enough happens to do lasting damage, yet so much solitary time with an increasingly unlikable guy is a lot to ask of the audience; as a short, it would be three times more effective. —Rod Lott