The Occupant (2011) is to me an interesting movie in these current times. The current unpleasantness, as I prefer to call it, has driven us back inside our homes and who hasn’t occasionally felt like they weren’t alone in their own home?
In the movie, a young man, Danny Hill, comes into what could be considered a dream apartment through sad means: his grandmother dies. However, she lives in a massive, spacious, rent controlled apartment in New York. The kind of place a person would give an arm and a leg for. And all Danny has to do to get it is lock himself in for 12 days.
It is never explained whether what Danny experiences which drives him to paranoia is actually real or a product of his own imagination; (If you have a theory, please feel free to share.) however, what gets him in the end is his own paranoia about the situation in the form of one of his traps backfiring and killing him. The movie came out in 2011, I am not super worried about spoilers at this point.
What’s got me thinking about this movie again is the fact of having to be home for over a month with minimal human interaction. At the time of the current unpleasanteness starting, I had roommates, which is probably what saved my sanity. I mean, I have my cats for company, but how many conversational meows can one manage before one gets the urge to just lay there on the floor in the sun until you burn? Whatever, no matter how you look at it, human beings are social animals. This is just one of the reasons that solitary confinement is often considered a cruel and unusual punishment. It removes a man from his tribe and long ago, such exile meant death. Unfortunately for Danny boy, the fear of loss (of something that wasn’t his but he convinced himself it was) and the actual loss of his connection to other humans, turned into something dark and powerful. If he had been willing to lose the apartment, which was never his, then he could have kept his sanity.
So keep in mind, no man is an island. And being the only one on the island may mean it isn’t another human that gets you but you yourself.