****SPOILERS**** Senseless film that gets more confusing as it moves along to it's ending that instead of giving the audience some clarity and logic to what it saw up to then it muddles the story even more. "Apartment Zero" should have aptly been named "Roommates from Hell" with the movie centering around two oddballs playing all kinds of crazy games with each other. The first Adrian, Colin Firth, an Englishman living with his mother in Buenos Aires and second Jack, Hart Bochner, an American working for some communication firm in the Argentine capital. Adrian and Jack are so different to each other in their interests and relationships as well as their conception of right and wrong as Mother Theresa is to Atilla the Hun.
Adrian runs a movie theater and rooming house and the theater seems to be losing money but you never see him have any financial troubles running it during the entire film. You get the impression that Adrian is independently wealthy and just does that, the running of the theater at least, as a hobby. As we soon find out Adrian is a very big movie buff especially in those black & white movies of the 1930's 40's and 50's.
With Adrian's dying mother sent to a nursing home he put up her apartment for rent and one of the people looking to rent it is a good-looking charming and what seems like a very nice person Jack who's from the USA working in Buenos Aires. Struck by Jack's charm and good-looks as well as wanting to have someone to take his mothers place, as someone to talk and confide to his most intimate feelings, Adrian not only takes Jack in but, to Jack's complete surprise, offers to cook breakfast for him every morning and even do his laundry for no extra charge.
The movie goes on for over a half hour giving you the impression that Adrian and Jack were gay lovers with Jack using and playing around with Adrian's nerves by needling him about going out with girls and getting drunk. On one occasion Jack even leaves him, only to have Adrian beg him to come back, just to see how far he can go to break Adrian down emotionally. I think that Adrian just wanted someone to fill the void that his mother, who later died, left in his life and there was nothing sexual at all in Adrian's longing for Jack's company even though Jack seemed to mistake Adrian's feeling for him and think that he was madly in love with him.
Then just when you think that you finally got what was going on in the movie the truth comes out about Jack and it's all bad news. A friend of Adrian's Claudia, Fransesca d'Aloja, asks him if she could use his theater, and Adrian lets her, for a political forum about a series of murders and kidnappings in Argentina that they, in the forum, feel is connected to the government using death squads to stamp out political opposition.
Looking at a number of films and photos on the screen we see Jack involved in these atrocities and it turns out that Jack is not Jack but an American mercenary named Michael Weller who was reported killed some time ago in Argentina. Instead of concentrating in on this story the movie go back to it's confusing narrative with Jack and Adrian living and acting like the odd couple and later when it had Jack trying to leave the country his passport was found to be invalid. We then see Jack casually pick up some male hustler, at the airport, and murder him in his hotel room in order to steal his identity and leave Argentina as well as Adrian.
Jack then goes back back to Adrian's apartment where he finds Claudia looking for him, that's Adrian not Jack, only to murder her even though she didn't at all recognize him at all as the very dangerous Michael Weller, paid America killer, and thus trowing more attention on himself then there already was! which was none at all since Jack was reported to be dead and no one was looking for him in the first place.
The ending of the movie "Apartment Zero" was somewhat like the ending of the movie "Psycho", with Adrian acting and looking almost unrecognizable but unlike the Hitchcock horror classic this ending made absolutely no sense at! Your left wondering when it was all over if you just saw a very bad movie or woke up from an strange but horrific drug or alcohol induced nightmare!
Adrian runs a movie theater and rooming house and the theater seems to be losing money but you never see him have any financial troubles running it during the entire film. You get the impression that Adrian is independently wealthy and just does that, the running of the theater at least, as a hobby. As we soon find out Adrian is a very big movie buff especially in those black & white movies of the 1930's 40's and 50's.
With Adrian's dying mother sent to a nursing home he put up her apartment for rent and one of the people looking to rent it is a good-looking charming and what seems like a very nice person Jack who's from the USA working in Buenos Aires. Struck by Jack's charm and good-looks as well as wanting to have someone to take his mothers place, as someone to talk and confide to his most intimate feelings, Adrian not only takes Jack in but, to Jack's complete surprise, offers to cook breakfast for him every morning and even do his laundry for no extra charge.
The movie goes on for over a half hour giving you the impression that Adrian and Jack were gay lovers with Jack using and playing around with Adrian's nerves by needling him about going out with girls and getting drunk. On one occasion Jack even leaves him, only to have Adrian beg him to come back, just to see how far he can go to break Adrian down emotionally. I think that Adrian just wanted someone to fill the void that his mother, who later died, left in his life and there was nothing sexual at all in Adrian's longing for Jack's company even though Jack seemed to mistake Adrian's feeling for him and think that he was madly in love with him.
Then just when you think that you finally got what was going on in the movie the truth comes out about Jack and it's all bad news. A friend of Adrian's Claudia, Fransesca d'Aloja, asks him if she could use his theater, and Adrian lets her, for a political forum about a series of murders and kidnappings in Argentina that they, in the forum, feel is connected to the government using death squads to stamp out political opposition.
Looking at a number of films and photos on the screen we see Jack involved in these atrocities and it turns out that Jack is not Jack but an American mercenary named Michael Weller who was reported killed some time ago in Argentina. Instead of concentrating in on this story the movie go back to it's confusing narrative with Jack and Adrian living and acting like the odd couple and later when it had Jack trying to leave the country his passport was found to be invalid. We then see Jack casually pick up some male hustler, at the airport, and murder him in his hotel room in order to steal his identity and leave Argentina as well as Adrian.
Jack then goes back back to Adrian's apartment where he finds Claudia looking for him, that's Adrian not Jack, only to murder her even though she didn't at all recognize him at all as the very dangerous Michael Weller, paid America killer, and thus trowing more attention on himself then there already was! which was none at all since Jack was reported to be dead and no one was looking for him in the first place.
The ending of the movie "Apartment Zero" was somewhat like the ending of the movie "Psycho", with Adrian acting and looking almost unrecognizable but unlike the Hitchcock horror classic this ending made absolutely no sense at! Your left wondering when it was all over if you just saw a very bad movie or woke up from an strange but horrific drug or alcohol induced nightmare!