Rosemary's Baby (1968)

For me, it's not a big leap from childbirth to otherworldly gothic horror, and so when director Roman Polanski brings Ira Levin's macabre suspense novel to hideous life, it is just a question of how far he is going to ratchet up the terror as an angelic Mia Farrow experiences a troubled pregnancy and all around her in her and her husband's new New York apartment block, the behaviour of the residents is getting decidedly more odd and more and more in Rosemary's face.

★★★★★

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Sliver (1993)

A short-lived genre in the 90s was the "erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone" and in this not very erotic nor very thrilling addition, based on the Ira Levin book, Sharon Stone is the new resident in a NY apartment complex that happens to be not just under the thrall of a serial killer but also a shadowy voyeur who has the building under complete video-surveillance, affording viewers a look at what Director Phillip Noyce evidently thinks titillating: highly improbable, choreographed soft porn interactions between Sharon Stone and the likely culprit.

★☆☆☆☆

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Rear Window (1954)

Alfred Hitchcock's mystery suspense masterpiece has an incredibly elaborate purpose-built film-set of 31 apartments (eight of them fully furnished) and it stars James Stewart as a wheelchair-bound man who entertains himself by sitting at his apartment window observing his neighbours, one of whom may be a murderer!

★★★★★

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Single White Female (1992)

This in many ways unremarkable b-movie about a roommate who gradually takes over an apartment owner's life, adopting her fashion tastes and hairstyle, insinuating herself into her relationships and eventually tipping over the edge and going plain batshit crazy, unexpectedly resonated with audiences in 1992 and became a huge success - probably due in good part to the performance of its star: the inner city New York apartment in The Ansonia building that everybody wishes they could one day own, psycho roomie or not.

★★★★☆

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A Perfect Murder (1998)

A husband's plot to murder his wife by hiring his wife's lover as a hitman comes unstuck in a number of heavily signposted ways and from there this suspense thriller low on suspense and thrills, apparently inspired by Dial M For Murder but really only similar in two ways (Gwyneth Paltrow and Grace Kelly's blonde hair and a logic problem involving apartment door keys) goes on in rudderless, convoluted ways, desperately trying to find a way to wrap up the leaden acting and plodding events.

★★☆☆☆

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Esio Trot (2015)

The lengths Dustin Hoffman's Mr Hoppy goes to woo Judi Dench, the woman who lives below him in an apartment complex, are quite creepy: he repeatedly steals and replaces her pet tortoise to give her the impression it is growing, like the wooden leg trick in The Twits, another wickedly amusing Roald Dahl creation; this one is his story of elderly romance for young audiences!

★★★☆☆

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Lady in the Water (2006)

Awful to the point of being unwatchable is this self-indulgent movie from M Night Shyamalan based on a bedtime story he told his kids, apparently, featuring only completely cracked characters, residents of an apartment complex with a swimming pool that is home to a mermaid-like creature. 

★☆☆☆☆

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